Rheological properties of the system lime/sucrose/water

Mixtures of lime/sucrose/ water, at given compositions lead, to viscoelastic homogeneous pastes. The equilibrium state is reached after a time, which decreases when either the water content decreases or the lime concentration increases. At equilibrium, the general features of the spectromechanical analysis look like those for classical viscoelastic materials. Nevertheless, while the frequency dependence of the loss modulus is as expected, the exponent of the variation of the storage modulus with frequency is significantly lower than 2. It is clear that this system is not simply Maxwellian. The discussion deals with the origin of this behaviour, caused either by the presence of lime particles in excess, or the approach of gelation.