Possibility of using acoustic techniques for dough processing evaluation

Ultrasonic techniques have become developed and are widely used in many various fields of engineering and basic science. The development and optimization of industrial food processes requires a modern rapid non-destructive measuring technique for giving information about the useful fundamental and empirical properties of the product. This information provide better understanding of the processes that will consistently ensure a predefined quality at the end of manufacturing process therefore, led the industry to improve their conformity with manufacturing regulation. In this work, the developed non-invasive system showed the possibility of calculating the solid/non-solid density of dough, void fraction and complex moduli in dough, based on a two layer neural network that combine the acoustics impedance and energy of an ultrasonic signals passing through the dough specimens. A system of a low frequency ultrasound sensor devoted to this study for characterization of wheat flour-water system. The ultrasonic velocity measurements and attenuation was linearly related to the water contents of the tested dough samples. Several numerical models were constructed to test and validate the ultrasonic-velocity measurement system. The test and validation showed agreements with the achieved results with 1.88 %.maximum error in the ultrasonic-velocity. (c) 2011 Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of 11th International Congress on Engineering and Food (ICEF 11) Executive Committee.