| Rudy van
der Sman |
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| Title | Mesoscale modelling of structured foods | ||
| Abstract | Food is well renowned as a very complex
matter. Food is composed of water, fats, proteins and carbonhydrates, of
which some do not mix well. Moreover, most foods exhibit structure on the
micrometer scale. Well-known examples are emulsions as butter, and
colloidal suspensions as milk. Understanding the behaviour of such complex
material during processing has largely been obtained by empirical studies.
Nowadays a better, and more fundamental understanding is feasible by
taking a computional approach. The last decade computational tools have
been developed for simulating complex fluids, who exhibit structures on
the mesoscale. The mesoscale lies in between the molecular scale and the
macroscale, which we observe with our naked
eyes. At Wageningen University and Research
we apply such tools, as the Lattice Boltzmann scheme and Dissipative
Particle Dynamics, to simulate the behaviour of structured foods during
processing. In these models we describe explicitly the food structures,
i.e. emulsion droplets or solid particles suspended in
fluid. We will describe briefly the simulation methodology and will present some results of ongoing projects. In such a project we study the hydrodynamic behaviour of colloidal suspensions. A snapshot of such a simulation is shown in the figure below. In these projects we obtain valuable results which are usefull to our industrial partners for the design of processing equipment. |
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| Authors | |||
| Institution | Food and
Bioprocess Engineering, University of Wageningen |
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