Migration of Mineral Oil Saturated and Aromatic Hydrocarbons(MOSH, MOAH) through Multi-Layered Packaging into Food

C. Kirse [1], F. Edel [1], H. Briesen [1],
[1] Chair of Process Systems Engineering, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Published in 2016

Substances like Mineral Oil Saturated Hydrocarbons (MOSH) and Mineral Oil Aromatic Hydrocarbons (MOAH) are suspected to be carcinogenic. Furthermore, MOSH/MOAH migrate through the packaging into food stuff. This work aims at modelling, how much MOSH/MOAH migrates from the packaging into food to evaluate the exposure to toxic substances. The scope of the project is not to investigate one specific packaging, but to develop a tool that can be used for the simulation of a broad variety of packaging solution. Accordingly, instead of constructing the packaging consisting of several layers by hand, the LiveLink™ for MATLAB® is used to build a packaged food with an arbitrary number of layers. The migration of MOSH/MOAH can be described by Fick’ian diffusion. Within the packaging can be adsorbents for MOSH/MOAH which are considered by a reaction term. Because MOSH/MOAH are groups of chemically similar substances with different molecular weights, the transport of several representative species is computed. The diffusion coefficients are computed by empirical correlations in MATLAB®.