Baking with Sound: a successful industry-focussed research project

The Baking with Sound project, a research project co-funded by industry and Innovate UK, has come to the end of its current funding. We have taken the technology from a ‘batch’ setting to a set of prototypes that can produce bakery foodstuff in an industrial environment. In TRL terms, we have ratcheted up about 4 levels. We have generated and protected IP and trained 2 students and 2 research associates. We gelled a working research team that had fun, traveled the UK extensively and ate lots of our own experimental samples. (Some of them were even nice).

We have shown that the sonication technology has a positive effect on the crumb structure and texture on baked products in general, and of ‘free-from’ product range in particular (e.g. gluten-free and low-salt). The next stop for us is the integration of the sonication technology in the commercially designed bakery equipment apparatus.

The Baking with Sound consortium was formed by Macphie of Glenbervie, Nortek Piezo, MONO Bakery Equipment and Fosters Bakery (as industrial partners), and Loughborough University (as the academic lead).

The Future Engineer podcast engineer

STEM XX 016 episode is on the importance of multidisciplinary engineering, the power of positive thinking and biomimetics – learning from nature to solve our technical problems.

If you have ~30min to spare, have a listen and please leave comments below and tell me what you think. Thanks!

You can listen to it here and download it here.

Mathematical Modelling of the use of Ultrasound to Tailor Polymers

Materials whose internal porosity can be tailored during the manufacturing process could be of use in a wide range of applications such as bone scaffolds (to help new bone grow from stem cells).  A recent method for achieving such a manufacturing process involves the acoustic irradiation of a reacting polymer foam which then results in a final sample with a graded porosity.  This talk will present the first mathematical model of this process. The polymerisation process is complex involving, for example, bubble dynamics, evolving rheology, two phases, reaction kinetics, and gas diffusion.  In addition, the model has to include the effects of the irradiating ultrasound.  The model I will present treats the evolving fluid as a multimode Oldroyd B system and will focus on a single moving bubble boundary using a Lagrangian frame of reference.  After looking at the role that inertia has on the dynamics of the system, a multi-bubble model is constructed that generates a heterogeneous bubble size distribution shaped by the ultrasonic standing wave pattern.

My colleague Dr Tony Mulholland, from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Strathclyde, will present this remarkable piece of work on the 27^th January 2015 at 1pm in venue: S.1.73 (Materials Department, Loughborough University). Join us if you can.