Month: September 2024

Fish is loved by consumers – it is unique, nutritious and well-balanced. The four quality elements of food are texture, appearance, flavour and nutrition. Compared with the meat of livestock, tissue of fish is more soft and delicate in its chemical composition. With the development of people’s living standards and of the food processing industry, […]

Explaining texture preference Understanding texture preference and the trends that may result in consumer behaviour change is an area of great opportunity. However, remaining agile before a consumer shift occurs can be a challenge. A new webinar will address this challenge and will offer: • A view on techniques to forecast upcoming influences on food […]

Plasticity is a property shown by many materials, such as polymers, metals and the majority of foods. It is the ability of a material to undergo permanent deformation.  If you press your finger on a spring, it returns to its original shape. If you made that spring out of cheese, it would not spring back […]

Although it has long been known that some materials are harder than others, indentation tests to find quantitative hardness values only came about in the 1800s.  Once it was established as a valuable technique, hardness testing machines started to appear on the market early in the following century. Old fashioned indentation testing involved the application […]

Tensile testing involves a sample held in two grips a set distance apart. The loading arm (attached to the top grip) moves up at a constant speed to deform the sample, first deforming it elastically then plastically. If the force required to break the sample is within the limit of the load cell, fracture will […]

The calculation of parameters from the stress-strain graph of a tensile test has already been covered in a previous blog post.  The calculations considered were those most often used when referring to stress and strain, and to give them their full name they would be called “engineering stress” and “engineering strain”. It is usually safe […]

When a customer is presented with an elongated or flat food sample, one of the first things they might do is snap it between their hands.  During this process, they are subconsciously assessing whether the food product is brittle or ductile, stiff or compliant, and strong or weak. Consequently, bend testing is a technique used […]

Compression testing involves a self-supporting sample being compressed under a flat probe large enough to cover the whole sample.  The loading arm (attached to the probe) moves down at a constant speed to deform the sample, first deforming it elastically then plastically (if it is not completely brittle). If the force required to break the […]

Hysteresis in the context of deforming a material is the loss of energy in the form of heat when a sample is loaded then unloaded. This occurs due to internal friction, and so the effect is larger for a material such as rubber, which requires the movement of large molecular chains each time it is […]

Bulk modulus is a defined as the relative change in a sample’s volume when a unit compressive or tensile stress acts uniformly over its surface.  It is a measure of how resistant a substance is to pure compression. Its measurement is possible by the use of a Texture Analyser, providing care is taken over the […]