Many aspects of food functionality lead back to rheology, the study of a fluid’s response to an applied deformation or stress. Rheology is a very well-developed discipline that finds broad application in food science and also in food companies R&D. Shear rheology is what is predominantly studied. However, a lot of relevant deformations in processing flows, or when food stuffs are consumed, are at a minimum mixed shear and extensional or even pure extensional flows. For these scenarios, correlations of shear viscosity to the material behavior are often incomplete and an understanding of the extensional rheology is needed. Some examples are swallowing, mixing flows, and prominently in any fiber forming processes. The latter is of growing interest in the area of structuring technologies for plant and other non-animal protein sources, which enable innovation in the meat alternative space, which is a growing market based on consumer demand of climate-friendly and sustainable foods.
The aim is to further develop extensional and compressional rheological techniques to measure physical properties of both low viscosity (liquid) and high viscosity (semi-solid) foods that correlate with sensory attributes. The content of the project includes establishing sample preparation techniques, the metrology itself, data analysis and interpretation as well as building templates for data analysis. The candidate will collaborate with other departments for material analysis and most importantly with the applications group to produce realistic food models and with sensory science to establish correlations between physical properties and sensory attributes. Furthermore, the candidate will benefit from prior exposure to advanced data analysis techniques using state of the art software packages or programming languages as e.g. Python, Matlab, Visual Basic.
