Detalle de: Digital twin for fresh produce washing in flume tanks: Reducing water and sanitiser use while ensuring food safety

Washing fresh produce is essential to remove soil and to inactivate microorganisms that may pose risks in products commonly consumed raw. However, operating continuous flume-tank systems is challenging because of variable produce loads and the spatiotemporal interplay between water quality and sanitiser chemistry. This research addresses this challenge by developing a digital twin that optimally controls water and sanitiser additions during continuous flume tank operation. Its main component is a mechanistic model describing water quality dynamics, sanitiser decay, and microbial inactivation along the tank. This model is used offline to solve a multi-objective optimisation problem that balances water replenishment and sanitiser dosing while enforcing hygiene limits defined as a maximum allowable bacterial concentration at the tank outlet. The resulting Pareto front highlights how optimal solutions shift depending on whether water savings or sanitiser reductions are prioritised, and reveals the impractical volumes of water required when relying solely on water replenishment. For online use, the digital twins adjust the optimal solutions based on real-time measurements of incoming produce mass, ensuring hygiene requirement under fluctuating loads. This work demonstrates how digital-twins can enhance both resource efficiency and microbiological safety in industrial produce washing.