ABSTRACT
Industrial applications of extrusion technology have led to the launch of a rich extrusion processing culture. This has developed gradually from endless communication amongst practitioners and scientists. Polymer extrusion has had the benefit of widespread technical exploration and modeling, making it promising to forecast process performances. However, food extrusion processing, along with the reported designs, is fairly new, and it suffers from a deficiency of printed material. In addition, food extrusion inclines to be more segmented and application-oriented. Therefore, a multidisciplinary approach is necessary, for which a comprehensive estimate of the process performance is not yet available. The purpose of this chapter is to provide extensive information on extrusion processing. This chapter has been inspired both by existing applications of extrusion technology and by emerging techniques. The objective of this effort is to bridge the space between long-term experience in extrusion and the science of extrusion in order to create a link between the world of extrusion practitioners and that of imaging engineers in the field of food engineering. For this purpose, the generic extrusion process idea has been applied in order to represent and converse the extrusion processing culture and to shape the structure of the chapter content.
