A Capacitively Coupled Alternative Electric Field Control for Freeze-Free based High Quality Food Preservation

Freezing has been extensively used as the most common method in food storage application. However, it causes unavoidable poor quality of perishable foods such as meat and fishes by texture damage from ice nucleation of internal moisture. As a potential solution, lossless supercooling preservation technology using alternative electric field is newly proposed which has two parallel copper plate electrodes with 13.56 MHz and 50 Ω-matched impedance using CLC T-network on foods for deep penetration depth and maximum power transfer, separately. For 150 g of beef with 50 W, the supercooling state successfully last over 3 days with the meat temperature of -3°C at the ambient temperature of -10°C (the temperature to prevent bacterial growth) without phase transition from water to ice. Among several storage methods, the supercooled sample has the outstanding storage performance as the lowest drip loss of 0.9%, 7.8 times lower than the freezed sample and the lowest color change ratio of 8.1%, 2.9 times lower than the freezed one. These findings provide a solution for long-term and fresh food storage to meet the strong demand of consumers.