Cold point determination
Thermal Validation
Sometimes over looked as a step in food thermal validation but this is actually one of the most important steps because probe position errors can introduce huge errors into bacterial death calculations.
Cold point determination is finding the positions of lowest temperature within a product. For a liquid product the cold point location will be dominated by the degree of convection taking place. For a thin liquid, like a brine, cold spots can be within a few millimetres of the bottom of a container. For conductive products then shape and heat transfer rates from different surfaces dominate the location of the cold spot.