Formulaction Showcases Analysis Instruments
by Mary Ellen Kuhn
Formulaction Inc. (Booth 2868), a French company, with offices and technical staff in the United States, dedicated to “smart scientific analysis,” showcased some of its instrument offerings and explained how they can provide a variety of food and beverage industry solutions at a press conference on Sunday.
The company’s mission is to provide solutions to deeply and easily characterize emulsions, suspensions, and foams for stability and microrheology properties.
Formulaction’s line of Turbiscan® devices, which deliver comprehensive characterization of concentrated dispersions, work on the principle of multiple light scattering. This technique consists of sending photons (light) into a sample. These photons, after being scattered many times by objects in suspension, emerge from the sample and are detected by the measurement devices of the Turbiscan (backscattered or transmitted flux).
Here’s just one example of a food/beverage application. Formulaction’s Turbiscan Lab is ideally suited to studying the effects of various ingredients and processes on the stability of dairy products, an application that is helpful in the formulation of supplemented milk products, which may be difficult to stabilize during storage. The Turbiscan Lab detects destabilization phenomena and allows for a quantitative comparison of the results of the analysis with a detection speed up to 200 faster than conventional techniques.
Formulacation’s Rheolaser® Lab is another instrument with a variety of significant applications for the food industry. The company bills it as the first ready-to-use instrument to perform microrheology experiments.
Rheology of food products such as cheese, salad dressing, and butter is a key parameter that must be controlled during and after the manufacturing process. Viscoelastic behavior drives several end use properties including spreadability, shape stability, and physical stability. Microrheology, a new domain of rheology, characterizes the structure of material at the micron scale and allows for easy characterization of such properties by measuring the viscosity and elasticity of samples at rest vs ageing time and over a large frequency range, thanks to a noncontact measurement method without the limitations of classical rheology.