Below is a list of submitted presentations that have been accepted for the upcoming event and will be featured in the official program. These sessions reflect the expertise, innovation, and insight our community brings to the table.
“As the food and beverage industry faces increasing pressure to innovate healthier products without compromising consumer enjoyment, modelling and simulation technologies offer a powerful, yet underutilised, solution. These tools can unlock significant cost savings by resolving manufacturing challenges and accelerating smarter product design. Despite their potential, adoption remains low—hindered by the complexity, time investment, and advanced technical knowledge required to build high-fidelity, physics-based models that accurately reflect real-world food processes.
The rheological behaviour of raw and processed foods is inherently complex, often involving multiscale structures made up of different materials and multiple phases—such as colloids, slurries, and foams. Accurately simulating these systems poses significant challenges, particularly when it comes to capturing the dynamic interactions that occur during food processing. These include realistic modelling of liquid–solid mixing, fragmentation, multiphase flow behaviour, and the influence of intricate machinery geometries. A novel particle-based approach will be presented, combining Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) for modelling continua (liquids and deformable solids) with the Discrete Element Method (DEM) for tracking discrete elements like particulates and bubbles. This hybrid method enables realistic predictions of mixing, fragmentation, flow, and structural transformation across a range of food systems and processes.
The talk will also highlight the role of Digital Human models in bridging food processing with in-body performance and includes results from our recent work with Pepsico on material characterisation and oral processing of snack products. Further, by simulating oral processing and gastric digestion, such models may provide valuable insights into how food structure impacts nutrient release, satiety, and sensory perception - paving the way for reformulated products that better align with both health goals and consumer expectations.”
Bio: Dr Matt Sinnott is a Principal Research Scientist with the Modelling and Simulation team of CSIRO Data61, Australia. The team are world leaders in the development of Particle Based Modelling (PBM) methods: Discrete Element Method (DEM) and Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), and the coupling of these and additional solvers to model multi-physics systems. From a background in computational & particle physics, he was awarded his PhD in high energy astrophysics at Adelaide University in 2002 and joined CSIRO to simulate dynamic complex physical systems involving fluid/granular/material flows. His research work spans diverse application domains from industrial process engineering to the biophysical “Digital Human” space. Winner of the 2022 iChemE Senior Moulton Medal for his paper “A particle-based modelling approach to food processing operations”, he has 127 peer-reviewed publications (57 journal; 65 conference; 5 book chapters) and has been cited more than 3500 times with a h-index of 35 (Google Scholar). Matt’s research focus is on studying the interplay between different physics at different scales which influence the emergent behaviours of complex physical systems, and how to leverage that knowledge to control those behaviours for desired outcomes. He often seeks opportunities for innovation and novel perspectives that come from multidisciplinary approaches, particularly where different application domains (such as food manufacturing and in-body digestion) intersect and influence each other.
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