Keynote: Solving Problems in the Food Processing Industry with Multiphysics Models

At Conagra Brands, Soon Kiat Lau and his team use multiphysics simulation to solve common challenges in the food processing industry, as discussed in this keynote talk from the COMSOL Conference 2025 Boston.

Lau begins with an overview of the operations that make up food processing before digging into the various challenges of optimizing, troubleshooting, and scaling them up and down. The main challenges addressed in this talk include the sheer volume of different processes and equipment, natural variances present in food's material properties, and the subjectivity of food enjoyment. Lau presents solutions for each of these challenges throughout the presentation, often relying on a "food-centric" approach to modeling, which allows for judicious simplifications to be made during the process.

Soon Kiat Lau is a senior research engineer at Conagra Brands, where he troubleshoots and optimizes food processes using a combined approach of multiphysics modeling, data acquisition, and prototyping. Lau received a dual major PhD in food science and biological engineering from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.