28/04/2017: Brabender extruders for the food lab

Extruder products rank among the pioneering opportunities for product innovation in the food sector with promising opportunities on the market

This is why practically relevant equipping with extrusion equipment is a fixed constituent of the “toolbox” that is required for product developers in the food industry. New developments in snack products, breakfast cereals, flat breads, sweets, pet food and other special products can be prepared on a laboratory scale using this modern key technology. 

Lab-Compounder KETSE 20/40

Brabender provides suitable instruments for experimental trials of potential product lines with extrudates in a wide range of shapes, colours and flavours. They are compact and can be put to versatile use in innovative food laboratories. They make it possible for modern foods to be developed under realistic process conditions.

This means that ongoing production is not impacted, which saves money but is still consistently quality oriented. There are few procedures with as much potential for completely redesigning a product matrix. In order to develop innovative food textures and structures, the parameters of pressure, temperature, and shear can be varied during extrusion without changing the final product.

Continuous operation in a closed system combines complex production steps into a constant, continuous production process. If product developers have to experiment on extruders during live operations in order to do this, this can lead easily to operational disruptions.

This is why laboratory extruders are a sensible alternative for everyone involved in the development and testing of new processes and products – regardless of existing traditional processes, and with potential prospects for creating something completely new.

Six arguments speak in favour of practical product development with laboratory extruders rather than experimental interventions in the production process:

• You get to know new processes, and are able to test textures and sensory characteristics before trials have to be conducted on a production scale.
• You can vary your application ideas in a wide variety of ways: in terms of raw materials, composition, machine or product.
• You require significantly less material to carry out your trials, and hardly any product waste occurs.
• You don’t have to worry about impacting your current quality management system.
• You can establish methods for measuring your quality from raw material to end product in advance, in order to be in a position to react to quality variations in a better way at a later date.
• You can easily achieve a return on investment with an appropriate philosophy of innovation within your company.
 

Brabender has many years of global experience with extruders and the practical deployment thereof: Thanks to the transfer of technology between plastics processing, the pharmaceutical industry and the food sector, Brabender can provide extrusion expertise in three essential fields of application.

The use of measuring extruder systems in food laboratories provides reliable results for the fine tuning of optimal production conditions and to providing constantly high product quality. As is to be expected from Brabender®, the extruder technology that is provided is suitable for a wide variety of uses, especially in the field of grain products, and can be networked with other ‘classical’ quality measuring processes.

Single-screw and twin-screw extruders or the modular expansion make it possible to adapt the processing conditions to the many different of products and tasks in the best possible way, customised to suit your operations:

• Quality control and analysis of raw materials
• Product development and recipe optimisation
• Testing of the extrusion properties of different materials
• Research and optimisation of processing characteristics
• Binding of active ingredients and aromatic substances to a carrier material, such as in snacks
• Measurement of rheological properties of material combinations
• Extrusion of degradable products
• Product manufacturing on a laboratory scale

At the same time, studies with laboratory extruders have a range of technical process advantages over other procedures such as the practically-oriented measurement of extrusion conditions with small sample volumes, rapid changes in trial conditions, and simple operation and cleaning.

Read more HERE.

 

The Global Miller
This blog is maintained by The Global Miller staff and is supported by the magazine Milling and Grain
which is published by Perendale Publishers Limited.

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