High-speed in-situ tomography of liquid protein foams

Abstract

Abstract For the engineering of foamed food products, knowledge about the foam structure as well as about its dynamics and stability are of critical importance. Using fast tomography in the laboratory as well as ultra-fast phase-contrast synchrotron tomography accurate information about the entire pore distribution in milk protein foams is obtained almost instantaneously. This study displays the four-dimensional structural dynamics of milk-protein foam decay over time with unparalleled temporal and spatial resolution of the measurement data down to 1 s scan time (for 11 μm voxel sampling) and to 2.7 μm voxel sampling (for 2 s scan time). Pore size investigation is applied to a 15 min cine-tomography series monitoring the four-dimensional time decay of β-lactoglobulin foam, providing new insights into the dynamics of liquid protein foams.