Application of biospeckle phenomenon on monitoring of leavening process in breadmaking

Abstract

Since the sixties, dynamic speckles have found a wide number of applications, covering fields from engineering to biomedicine. However, despite of this potential, its utilisation in food manufacture control is still incipient. In this work, our objective was to use the biospeckle phenomenon to monitoring the expansion of the dough during the leavening process. Our experiments consisted in the temporal evolution observation of speckle patterns scattered by samples prepared from two formulations: by yoghurt addition and without it. Every two minutes, it was constructed a 2‐D image, recording the Time History Speckle Pattern (THSP). The full monitoring time was 50 minutes. A new estimator of activity index, proposed by some of the authors, was used in data analysis. This estimator is based on contrast of successive correlations of intensities recorded in THSP. It was found a strong correlation between the activities on the samples and the type of fermentative agents. These results reveal an interesting potential of the biospeckle to control in bread manufacture industries.