This week Thursday November 20, we will have the pleasure to host Vivek Sharma (University of Illinois Chicago) for a SIMM Seminar « Engineering Plant-based Food Emulsions and Foams: Mayo to Milk ». The seminar will take place at 2 pm in Amphi Charpak.
Engineering Plant-based Food Emulsions and Foams: Mayo to Milk
The success and suitability of plant-based emulsions as sustainable, palatable, and healthy substitutes are tied to their ability to emulate the properties, processing, and functionalities of animal-based products. We translate several challenges underlying the design, manufacturing, and consumption of plant-based emulsions into fundamental quests in soft matter physics and rheology. We characterize the ingredient-dependent differences in flow behavior of animal and plant-based emulsions, with milk representing dilute and mayo jammed-dense emulsions, respectively. The presence of macromolecular additives like polysaccharides and proteins in suspending fluid and interfaces of plant-based emulsions makes their response non-Newtonian. The extensional and interfacial flows influence the emulsification, emulsion stability, and shear rheology. At the macroscale level, the extensional rheology response of the emulsions impacts many processing operations and sensory perception of texture, mouthfeel, and apparent thickness, stretchiness, or stringiness. However, there is a clear lack of appropriate extensional rheology characterization techniques, and a limited understanding of macromolecular or drop/particle microphysics that sets the rheological response and processability. We develop experimental protocols for characterizing the influence of ingredients like proteins and polysaccharides on shear rheology and extensionally dominated interfacial flows in pinching necks and draining films. By visualizing and analyzing flows in pinching necks created using dripping, dipping, dripping-onto-substrate (DoS) rheometry, and stretching bridges like in the tack test, we characterize the extensional rheology response relevant for processing and applications. We show that a deeper understanding of ingredient-dependent emulsion rheology, shelf-life, and consumer perception involves a joyous odyssey into the physics and mathematics of self-similarity, finite-time singularity in free-surface flows, colloidal interactions, coalescence and lubrication flows, pinching and spreading kinetics, stretched polymer physics, protein science, and scaling theory or dimensional analysis
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