Biomedical and Chemical Engineering Seminar: Vivek Sharma

The Department of Biomedical & Chemical Engineering is pleased to welcome Dr. Vivek Sharma from the University of Illinois Chicago in presenting his seminar, “Engineering Plant-Based Food Emulsions and Foams: Mayo to Milk.”

Abstract

We are fascinated by the complex fluid beauty and the challenges underlying the design, manufacturing, and consumption of plant-based emulsions, especially milk and mayo. The need to provide food and better living to the exploding world population promises to exacerbate climate change due to the high carbon cost per calorie and non-biodegradable products. Plant-based foods offer promising alternatives; however, their suitability as sustainable, palatable, and healthy substitutes will require emulating properties, processing, and functionalities of animal-based products. Here, we explore the challenges and opportunities in designing plant-based food emulsions from a soft matter physics and rheology perspective. We characterize the differences in flow behavior of animal and plant-based emulsions, with milk representing dilute and mayo jammed-dense emulsions, respectively. We contrast the foamability and foam stability/drainage of animal and plant milks. We show that a deeper understanding of emulsification, foamability and foam drainage, emulsion rheology, shelf-life, and consumer perception involves a joyous odyssey into the physics and mathematics of self-similarity, finite-time singularity in free-surface flows, coalescence and lubrication flows, pinching and spreading kinetics, stretched polymer physics, and scaling theory or dimensional analysis.

For more information, contact Prof. Era Jain at erjain@syr.edu or Dr. Ted Walker at twwalker@syr.edu