Forced convective heating for low-temperature sterilization.

A novel impermeable sterile pouch is developed to allow the forced convective heating mechanism for improving the sterilization cycle. The heating process is parametrically investigated to obtain an optimized condition in which a sterilization load is heated from 20 to 45 °C within 2 min, and the forced convection is experimentally and numerically analyzed to find that the convection coefficient is dramatically increased to 450 W/m2 K when compared with the conventional natural convection coefficient of 80 W/m2 K. The optimized heating process is applied to a sterilization cycle using the impermeable pouch, and the overall sterilization cycle is found to be completed within 7.5 min whose performance is validated by using a process challenge device.