Chapter 8 - Application of atomic force microscopy for food powders and contact materials

Abstract

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a very powerful, versatile, and highly resolutive tool. Its application to study food sciences products has been emerging for the past few years, particularly for food powders. This chapter aims to review how AFM was used in order to have a better understanding of how particle surface properties can significantly impact powders’ properties and functionalities. The first section studies the usefulness of AFM to characterize the impact of formulation and processing parameters on carbohydrate, protein, and lipid-based powders. The second section mainly highlights the use of various AFM experiments such as surface topographies, roughness, and nanomechanics analysis (e.g., particle surface elasticity) related to the powder functionalities such as powder rehydration, powder cohesion, and/or flowability. This section also presents how AFM was used to study food powders as a vehicle of bioactive molecules and how it was useful to prevent many encountered undesired effects, such as caking. Finally, morphological and qualitative studies of contact materials related to food are also reviewed. To end this chapter and show how AFM is still an emerging tool in the food powder field, prospects and advances on AFM techniques to characterize food powders are discussed.