A Transducer for the Direct Measurement of Rates of Lethality during Thermal Processing of Foods

A transducer to directly measure lethality rates during thermal processing was designed and tested. The transducer consisted of a double-legged thermocouple, thermocouple conditioner, and an antilog amplifier. Lethality rates measured real-time during thermal process experiments compared well with those calculated after-wards. A microcomputer data acquisition system was designed to evaluate this transducer. This data system was a general purpose system and can be easily modified to meet the data recording needs of similar experiments and routine processing operations.