Culinary fluid mechanics and other currents in food science

Abstract

Innovations in fluid mechanics have refined food since ancient history, while creativity in cooking inspires science in return. Here, we review how recent advances in hydrodynamics are changing food science, and we highlight how the surprising phenomena that arise in the kitchen lead to discoveries and technologies across the disciplines, including rheology, soft matter, biophysics and molecular gastronomy. This review is structured like a menu, where each course highlights different aspects of culinary fluid mechanics. Our main themes include multiphase flows, complex fluids, thermal convection, hydrodynamic instabilities, viscous flows, granular matter, porous media, percolation, chaotic advection, interfacial phenomena, and turbulence. For every topic, we first provide an introduction accessible to food professionals and scientists in neighbouring fields. We then assess the state-of-the-art knowledge, the open problems, and likely directions for future research. New gastronomic ideas grow rapidly as the scientific recipes keep improving too.

Drying dynamics of sessile-droplet arrays

“…Diffusion-controlled evaporation of sessile droplets is a common occurrence in everyday life, as well as in a myriad of technologically advanced applications [1][2][3]. The ubiquity and significance of this phenomenon have motivated researchers from different fields to examine it in detail.…”

Interfacial activity dynamics of confined active droplets

“…Phoretic mechanisms are widely used to actuate transport, be it externally mediated, e.g. by chemo-or electrophoresis, or self-generated: at macroscopic scales, phoresis can drive living organisms and culinary Marangoni cocktails (Mathijssen et al 2022), and in microfluidic environments it can power self-propelled microswimmers like active colloids or droplets (Peddireddy et al 2012;Herminghaus et al 2014;Izri et al 2014;Maass et al 2016;Babu et al 2022;Birrer, Cheon & Zarzar 2022;Dwivedi, Pillai & Mangal 2022;Michelin 2023), or self-driven micropumps for nutrient or fuel mixing and advection in artificial and biological systems (Gilpin, Prakash & Prakash 2017b;Yu et al 2020;Antunes et al 2022). In self-actuated systems, fluid transport is induced through non-equilibrium processes at the interface between the particle and the surrounding fluid where a slip velocity and/or tangential stresses are generated (Anderson 1989).…”

The intertwined physics of active chemical reactions and phase separation

“…Phase separation plays a crucial role for providing robust microstructures in technology [1][2][3][4], biology [5][6][7], and even cooking [8]. In many cases, these structures provide a basis for controlling chemical reactions or are themselves affect by reactions.…”