Numerical simulation of physical systems in agri-food engineering

In agri-food engineering many complex problems arise in plant and process design. Specifically the designer has to deal with fluid dynamics, thermal or mechanical problems, often characterized by physics coupling, non-linearity, irregular geometry, anisotropy and in definitive rather high complexity. In recent years, the ever growing availability of computational power at low cost, made these problems more often approached with numerical simulation techniques. Mainly in terms of finite elements and finite volumes. In this paper the fundamentals of numerical methods are briefly recalled and a discussion about their possibility of application in the food and agricultural engineering is developed.