College of Engineering > Academic Programs > Biosystems Engineering > About BSEN > Facilities > Departmental Laboratories > Food & Bioprocess Engineering Laboratory I

Food & Bioprocess Engineering Laboratory I

Corley Annex 1

• Oladiran Fasina, P.E.
• Yifen Wang

The primary food and bioprocess engineering laboratory houses equipment for food and biomaterial properties measurement and two environmental chambers for conditioning and processing biomaterials.  This laboratory has 1074 square feet.  Several new equipment items combine to make this laboratory very adequate for food and biomaterials testing and analysis. 

Equipment:

• Bohlin CVO100 Rheometer: Measures the viscoelastic properties of materials from low viscosity solutions to polymer melts. The equipment is attached to a fluid circulator that enables the measurement of properties at temperatures that vary from below freezing up to 180C. A windows-based software is used to control the operation of the equipment, and to collect and store data.
• Hunterlab Colorflex colormeter/spectrophotometer. This is a small, bench-top instrument that can be used to measure the color and reflectance of solids, powders and liquids in the visible wavelength region (400 nm to 700 nm). Even though it has its own display, keypad and storage ability, the instrument can be used with PC and EasyMatch QC windows-based software.
• Texture Analyzer HD. This equipment is used to perform tests in both tension and compression for cycling, flexure, constant strain and stress relaxation on such products as food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, packaging and adhesives. The equipment is operated via a comprehensive software package that supports totally programmable multi-stage testing, multichannel data acquisition. This enables the user to be able to define individual arm movement sequences at various speeds and distances. This unique control feature enables the most complex test protocols to be established. The texture analyzer has a capacity of 500 kg.
• Gas pycnometer: This is a fast, fully automatic density analyzer that performs high-speed, high-precision volume and density measurements on a wide variety of materials including powders, objects, and slurries. The pycnometer completes most analyses in 2 to 3 minutes without sacrificing accuracy by using a gas (helium) displacement technique for measurement.
• Moisture sorption system: This system consists of a humidified air generator (temperature of 15 to 60C and humidity of 40 to 90%) connected to a fabricated wooden chamber. Conditioned air from generator is directed to the chamber and the sample inside the chamber sorb or desorb moisture. The sample is placed in a basket that is hung from the underside of a balance. The balance is connected to the RS232 port of a computer thus making it possible to monitor and record the mass of sample during moisture sorption experiments.