Publications

Although bread-making has been practised for millennia, our fundamental scientific understanding of this process is still surprisingly limited. For the preparation of bread dough, only four ingredients are essential: wheat flour, water, salt and yeast. Wheat flour contains mostly starch and gluten proteins. During mixing, which involves substantial shear and extensional deformations, the gluten proteins tend to form a network, thereby ...

Plant-tissue-based food suspensions, like soups, sauces and purées, consisting of a particle fraction and a continuous serum phase, are the final result of structure-enabling (e.g. blending, mixing, high-pressure homogenisation) and preservation unit operations (e.g. heating, high-pressure treatments) used during production. The structural organisation of these suspensions, governing their functional properties, is largely determined by the ...

Manufactured sand (MS) has attracted increasing attention and been graduallyused to replace natural sand as aggregate of mortar and concrete, due to the decreasingavailability of natural sand and environmental impacts caused by over exploitation.The crushing process provides MS with irregular particle shape and rough surfacetexture. These features make the properties of mortar and concrete with MS differentfrom those with natural sand, ...

Concrete production processes do not take fiill advantage of the rheological potential offfesh cementitious materials, and are still largely labour-driven and sensitive to the humanfactor. The recently started ERC Advanced Grant project 'SmartCast' proposes a new concretecasting concept to transform the concrete industry into a higlily automated technologicalindustry. Currently, the rheological properties of the concrete are defined by mix ...

The rheological properties of a particle suspension can be substantially altered by adding a small amount of a secondary fluid that is immiscible with the bulk phase. The drastic change in the strength of these capillary suspensions arises due to the capillary forces, induced by the added liquid, leading to a percolating particle network. Using rheological scaling models, fractal dimensions are deduced from the yield stress and from oscillatory ...

Gelling colloidal suspensions represent an important class of soft materials. Their mechanical response is characterized by a solid-to-liquid transition at a given shear stress level. Moreover, they often exhibit a complex time-dependent rheological be- havior known as thixotropy. The viscosity changes find their origin in the microstruc- ture, which depends on flow history. Yet, the structural response to flow of colloidal gels differs ...

In this study, we present a comparative investigation of linear and branched wormlike micelles using two nonlinear rheological tools: orthogonal superposition rheology and large amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) rheology. The surfactants were a series of mixtures of octyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (C8TAB) and sodium oleate (NaOA). A transition from linear to branched wormlike micelles was obtained by either varying the relative ratio of NaOA ...

The influence of air on the fresh properties of cementitious materials is still a point of discussion in concrete research. On the one hand, fluctuations of entrapped air can change the predicted properties in an undesirable way. On the other hand, it is known that the addition of air entrainment changes the rheology significantly. A profound research on the impact of different methods to change the air content, is necessary. We investigated the ...

The effect of particle shape in two-dimensional suspensions has been investigated using model polystyrene ellipsoids. Optical video microscopy and interfacial rheology, using a range of surface rheometers, were used to study the rheology-structure correlation in these suspensions. For water-air or water-oil interfaces, ellipsoids of the same surface chemistry and size gives rise to either predominantly linear chains or very dense aggregates. ...

© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2015, 132, 42430. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. In this article, the influence of the rheological behavior of miscible blends of a linear and a high melt strength, branched, polypropylene (HMS PP), on the cellular structure and mechanical properties of cellular materials, with a fixed relative density, has been investigated. The rheological properties of the PP melts were investigated in ...