The cajá pulp has been exported from the Northeast area to all parts of Brazil, and one of the ways of conserving it is processing and storing it in the frozen form. During the processing, there are two factors that favor the quality of the product to be stored; the speed that the product is frozen and the addition of sugar as a form of hindering the microbiologic action. In the process line, some thermo-physics properties like the specific heat and the density change themselves according to the negative temperatures and the total soluble solids content. Then, it's necessary to know those properties mainly when cryogenic equipments are operated, where the temperatures can be -196 ºC to have the appropriate dimension of machines and equipment. Therefore, in this work, it was determined the cajá pulp density and the specific heat for 4 different levels of total soluble solids (natural of the pulp; 20; 40 and 60%) and temperatures from -196 to -18 ºC. The density was obtained by the rate between mass of the pulp and its volume. The volume was determined by the displacement of mass (water) and the specific heat was determined by the balance of heating among the mass of the pulp, the mass of the cylinder that contains the pulp and the mass of the ice. The results allow to conclude that: a) the cajá pulp density increases in function of the variation of the temperature from -18 to -196 °C, and also as a function of the increase of the total soluble solids content from 9 to 60 °Brix; b) the cajá pulp specific heat decreases according to the decrease of the temperature and it increases according to the concentration of total soluble solids.
thermo-physics properties; cryogenics; freezing
