Chapter 3 - Modeling microbial inactivation during cold atmospheric-pressure plasma (CAPP) processing

Abstract

Cold atmospheric-pressure plasma (CAPP) treatments allow reducing the microbial loads in food products in a rapid, nonthermal, and cost-effective manner. Nonlinear survival patterns have been extensively reported during the CAPP inactivation of bacteria, yeasts, molds, and even viruses. These survival curves predominantly exhibit concave upward, and downward shapes and are adequately described using nonlinear models such as the Weibullian model. Departure from linearity has been mainly attributed to the combination of components responsible for lethality in CAPP treatments, the distribution of stress resistance to the generated lethal factors within a microbial population and the changing concentration of lethal agents throughout the treatment. Without taking into consideration these factors, the proposed models are merely descriptive, and although they could be used for comparison among treatments, their parameters might convey inaccurate information. This chapter presents a summary of available models and modeling approaches to characterize and estimate microbial inactivation under CAPP.