Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation in Food Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

Demand for safer, higher-quality, and more sustainable food production is driving innovation in non-destructive testing (NDT) for food engineering. NDT techniques enable real-time quality assessment, process optimisation, traceability, and safety compliance without damaging the product. This Special Issue explores the latest advancements in NDT applications for enhancing food quality control, reducing waste, and improving efficiency.

Conventional destructive testing methods can be costly and impractical for large-scale operations. In contrast, NDT methods, such as hyperspectral imaging, ultrasound, X-ray, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and dielectric spectroscopy, offer rapid, non-invasive analysis of food composition, texture, moisture, and contaminants. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning further enhances these technologies, allowing automated and data-driven analysis for the food industry.

This Special Issue welcomes contributions on novel NDT techniques, including the following:

• Advanced imaging and spectroscopy for food quality assessment;
• AI-enhanced NDT for classification and safety monitoring;
• Ultrasonic and electromagnetic methods in food processing;
• Non-invasive detection of contaminants and adulterants;
• Smart food manufacturing and packaging applications.

By integrating food engineering and NDT, this Special Issue will promote interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation in food production, food quality, and safety. We invite researchers and industry experts to submit original research, reviews, and case studies showcasing emerging solutions and future directions.

Foods, especially new foods, have to meet a stringent set of criteria; these include nutritional quality, flavour, and novelty, but most of all they should be safe. Indeed, the UK press is currently full of references to laboratory-grown meat. Thus, the investigation of foods needs to take many forms, such as chemical tests, looking for adulterations; microbiological tests, looking for contamination; physical tests, looking for foreign bodies; and ‘morphological’ tests to check that the food structure matches its intended function. Indeed, all the above concepts have to work at a variety of length scales. Food scientists may be interested in the millimetre and microgram scales, and the food engineer the metre and the kilo scales; both need to measure and understand what the food in front of them has right or wrong with it. For the “scientist” to conduct these tests non-destructively means that the potential of food might be better explored; by this, we mean understanding the action of the food upon ingestion.  Food is fantastically dynamic and is examined by the human eating machine, which is highly and adapted and very interrogatory, telling us, “the consumer”, all about what we’ve just eaten. Butter is a classic example of the metastability of enjoyable foods, where it phase-inverts to deliver lubricity and flavour when in contact with the warm oral cavity. But to look at butter you cannot break it into its component parts and retain the picture of its dynamic nature. Equally, at the food production line, quite simple and mechanical measures, for instance, balances or metal detectors, tell the engineer that a process is well behaved and there should be little cause from concern. However, slight deviations in parameters can give the ‘night shift’ great consternation in tracing down the problem and indeed the non-invasive approach may quickly become quite invasive and messy. This Special Issue will capture the ‘flavour’ of investigations that these two closely allied groups, scientists and engineers, conduct and offer insights to what is new, what might be new and what the future potentially holds.

Thank you for your potential involvement with this project.

Prof. Dr. Phil Cox
Dr. Fideline Tchuenbou-Magaia
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. NDT is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• non-destructive testing (NDT)
• food quality assessment
• food safety
• hyperspectral imaging
• artificial intelligence (AI)
• ultrasonic testing
• contaminant detection
• smart food manufacturing
• smart packaging
• food systems