Modelling of Mass and Gas Transfer Through Polysaccharide-Based Films

Packaging is one of the significant processes that plays an important role in maintaining the quality of food products for storage, transportation and end-use, and innovation is still carrying on over time. Beyond preservation prospects, selling and sales promotion are secondary objectives of packaging. However, the preservation and safe delivery of food products till consumption are the primary goals of food packaging. Therefore, necessary condition for appropriate food packaging is categorised as their mass production, reasonable and efficient packaging material, suitable structure and form and consideration of disposal. Polysaccharide films may be suitable for disposal point of view. But these should stand on other parameters of food packaging systems such as barrier properties and maintain food quality and shelf life. Therefore, there is a need of mathematical models that may replace the experimental findings with actual process. So these models represent important tools for regulators and industry professionals, enabling them to study the mass and gas transfer through packaging materials to foods; this resulted into a substitute of costly and time-consuming migration experiments. Several approaches have been made for modelling to plastic packaging material over time. There are not significant studies on modelling of bio-plastics but importantly research and development is going on. Diffusion has been observed as major phenomena in mass and gas transfer on food packaging system along with absorption and desorption phenomena so that these developed models may be used for their characterisation purposes. Several programming softwares and data book have been developed from this model and studies over time; they may be also used for the above said purposes of polysaccharide films.