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ABSTRACT A pulsed ohmic heating system and flexible package for food reheating and sterilization were developed to minimize Equivalent System Mass during long‐duration space missions. A package made of flexible pouch materials was powered through a pair of metal foil electrodes extending out. Preliminary tests of the package within an ohmic heating enclosure show that International Space Shuttle menu items such as chicken noodle soup and black beans could be heated using pulsed ohmic heating technology. The electrical conductivities of selected samples ranged between 0.01 and 0.03 S/cm. A 2‐D thermal‐electric model was developed using commercial CFD software Fluent to optimize the design and layout of electrodes to ensure uniform heating of the material. A static system under the assumption of there being no fluid motion in a microgravity environment was implemented. A package configuration with V‐shaped electrodes with dimensionless width of 0.147 was validated to be most appropriate for uniform heating while minimizing the cold zone to 2% of total area. The effect of field overshoot near the electrode edge is expected to be crucial to determine the uniformity of heating.
Jun et al. (Mon,) studied this question.