Heat removal from heat-sensitive foods: an economic approach to the transient behaviour of finned surfaces

The transient behaviour of a fin used to remove heat from the surface of a rectangular-shaped liquid food container is studied in dimensionless form leading to a single-term equation for the heat transferred in relation to time. For heat-sensitive foods the rate of heat removal is important so an economic value can be ascribed to such removal to balance the captial investment on finning the container. An optimal solution can be found in order to maximize the net profit involved using the fin length as the independent variable.