University News for February 5, 2010

Researchers with the University of Manitoba are confident new state-of-the-art ultrasound technology will improve their ability to characterize complex food structures.

The University of Manitoba has been awarded funding to purchase a versatile ultrasonic transducer-array system to augment its existing ultrasound laboratory.

The instrument will be used to gain a better understanding of the movement of waves through complex materials and develop new techniques for characterizing those materials.

Dr. John Page, a physics and astronomy distinguished professor with the University of Manitoba, says part of the project will involve using information obtained through fundamental studies in the food science arena.

Clip-Dr. John Page-University of Manitoba:
Many many foods have complicated internal structures.

One example is bread dough and bread.

It's full of bubbles, it's full of starch granules and the interactions of the bubbles and the matrix influence whether you're going to make a good loaf of bread out of the dough you've mixed.

That's just one example of the many complex structures that one has in foods.

One example where this might be really interesting is in the development of new functional foods.

As soon as you add a new healthy ingredient to a food there's a danger you will damage the structure and therefore have to change the processing conditions.

We're hopeful that the technology we're going to be able to get is going to help us with understanding how to use ultrasound in a better way to characterize and control food properties during processing.

Dr. Page acknowledges it may take several years to develop the fundamentals before moving to applications.

He says while one of the first interests will be to apply the technology to food science, in the longer term advances in wave physics may be used for a wide range of other applications.

For UniversityNews.Org, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

*University News is a presentation of the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Agricultural & Food Sciences