Description
Presenters: Neil Cunningham & Erin Kuhn, Centre for Industrial Rheology
Moderator: Kumar Padmanabhan, Equinom Ltd.
The science of confectionery is a sticky business, and if you’ve been tasked to identify why a product won’t hold its shape, pump, gel, wobble, stick, snap, melt or even feel creamy, looking for answers can feel overwhelming. This presentation will outline typical observations of confectionery behavior in terms of their handling, processing and stability that can be described or best understood using rheological characterization methods. Presenters will cover how to quantify creeping flow behavior common in materials like fudge, benchmarking starch and pectin gels and comparing melt behavior. This includes viscosity profiling, oscillatory profiling, yield stress measurements and temperature dependent changes in rheology. We’ll break down some key concepts regarding viscous and elastic behavior – how to identify which is which, where and how their numerical values come from and what they mean in practice. G’, G” and G* will be explained, with real-world examples of how rheology can quantify differences in physical behavior, followed by how to use that data in a practical application.
