Predictive Simulation of Pulsed Electric Field Exposure Effects on Vegetable Tissues and Bacterial Suspensions

Project Description As part of a team working on a USDA/NIFA funded project entitled, “Nonthermal Decontamination of Leafy Vegetable Food Products Using Nanosecond Pulsed Electric Field Exposures,” the Research Computing Facilitator (RCF) will help enable specific analytical work by performing COMSOL Multiphysics simulations of local electric field distributions, current densities, and Joule heating within leafy green vegetable tissue and bacterial suspensions between electrodes in order to predict threshold electric pulse exposures for thermal tissue damage. Matlab or Python scripts will be written for further analysis of the simulation data. Three-dimensional models of electrodes, custom exposure chambers, and tissues or cell suspensions will be constructed using a CAD software such as Solidworks and then imported into COMSOL. The RCF will take the lead on migrating this work to an HPC platform for production modeling. Computationally-intensive simulations will be run on the Rowan University Computing Cluster (RUCC).

The RCF student working on this project will interface with faculty, staff and other students to:
• Construct models that accurately simulate designed experimental conditions,
• Access, use, and retrieve data from RUCC,
• Create and test code to analyze data over the tested parametric spaces,
• Document the construction of simulations and written code, so that others can follow,
• Manage and organize all data within approved digital storage, and share all data with the faculty leader in appropriate file formats, and
• Assist in the interpretation, write-up, and publication of results.

In addition to potential academic publication(s) and conference presentation(s), milestone deliverables from this project will be shared publicly via posting to the project leader’s website.