Finite Element Modeling and Physical Property Estimation of Rheological Food Objects

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to accurately simulate the rheological behaviors of food objects undergoing a loading-unloading operation using finite element (FE) model. Due to the presence of residual deformation, it is difficult to model rheological behaviors. Especially, it is hard to accurately reproduce both rheological force and residual deformation simultaneously. In this study, objects made of food materials were tested. Force and deformation measurements were recorded for parameter estimation. Constitutive models were investigated for describing rheological behaviors. A parallel five-element model including two dual-moduli viscous elements was proposed to accurately predict both rheological force and residual deformation simultaneously. 2D/3D FE model was formulated for simulating rheological behaviors. To estimate the parameters, an effective four-step method was established based on nonlinear optimization which aimed at minimizing the differences of forces and deformation between simulation and experiments. The proposed FE model and parameter estimation method were validated in both 2D and 3D cases and good agreements were achieved in both rheological forces and deformation between numerically simulated and experimentally measured data.

Contact forces and motion behavior of non‐Newtonian fluid–solid food by coupled SPH–FEM method

“…The Young modulus of solid foods was set to 0.2, 0.15, and 5 MPa, respectively, because Young's modulus of solid foods can be similar to many softer foods, such as gummy bears (Williams et al., 2005), cooked Japanese radishes, and carrots (Ogawa et al., 2015). The viscoelastic parameters of solid food were defined by Abaqus 6.14 Prony series regarding previous studies on viscoelastic solid food (Cheyu, 2020; Yuhe, Lixun, Jinghui, et al., 2022; Yuhe, Lixun, Xingyuan, et al., 2022; Zhongkui & Shinichi, 2012; Zhongkui et al., 2021). Young's modulus of the spoon and the plate was 19.402 GPa.…”

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“…The idea is to iterate the FE simulation with updated parameters and minimize the difference of certain physical quantities (trajectory of the microsphere in this work) between experimental measurements and simulation results. This method has been successfully used to estimate the physical parameters of various viscoelastic materials in [12]. The objective function for the optimization problem can be formulated as…”

Challenges and Opportunities in Robotic Food Handling: A Review

“… Sakamoto et al (2007 , 2009) studied the viscoelasticity of Japanese food “Norimaki” using Maxwell and Burger models to realize the optimum design of robotic handling. Rheological models were also investigated by Wang and Hirai (2010 , 2012 ) to simultaneously capture both deformation (especially, residual deformation) and force of Japanese sweets.…”