Enhancing efficacy, performance, and applicability of additive food manufacturing
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The advent of three-dimensional (3D) printers has led to many industrial innovations by providing alternatives to conventional manufacturing in various disciplines, including food science and engineering. As an emerging digital fabrication technique, 3D printing relies on computer-aided design and a set of commands for physical production in a layer-by-layer fashion. AM technology has attracted much attention in the food industry due to advantages such as on-demand production, personalization in nutrition, better food textures, printing complex and appealing structures without using molds or fixtures. More recently, with the advances in engineering and digital technologies, four-dimensional (4D) printing has emerged, which is defined as property changes (e.g., shape morphing, color change) of a 3D-printed product after exposure to a stimulus (e.g., pH change, water, heat). Successful adoption of this novel AM technology needs substantial work in selecting appropriate materials, creating geometrical designs, and improving the stability of 3D printed products after processing. The applications of 3D and 4D printing using edible materials should consider the complexity of food systems and the availability of appropriate materials to enable desirable functions of foods. This study focused on using AM technology to create food products that are structurally stable, suitable for post-processing, and anisotropically-actuated via extrusion-based 3D printers. Cookie dough, a popular food containing multiple ingredients, was selected as a model system to investigate the effects of food components, pre-heating, different geometrical properties, and the baking conditions on the printability of food ink. A novel 3D printing methodology was established to create structurally stable cookies by modifying the dough recipe without using gums or stabilizers. The results indicate that the reduction of sugar is an effective way to develop structurally stable cookies by 3D printing. On the other hand, pre-heating improves the printing performance and shape stability of the cookie dough systems by yielding a dense network and affecting conformational changes. The baking conditions and geometrical properties affected the quality of 3D-printed shapes, such as layer cracking due to high-temperature cooking. In addition, this study explored the osmotically driven and anisotropically actuated 4D printing concepts using edible composite films and elucidated two different mechanisms of 4D printing: shape-changing and color-transforming. Edible composites containing ethyl cellulose and gelatin were formed and submerged into water, resulting in osmotically driven structural changes of the composites. The results demonstrate that mismatching in the swelling behaviors of film components and geometrical properties of designed shapes are critical to controlling the shape-morphing behaviors of the composite structures. This study proves the great potential of 3D and 4D printing in the food industry.
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Ph. D.