Microstructured Fibers for the Production of Food

Abstract

Food engineering faces the difficult challenge of combining taste, i.e., tailoring texture and rheology of food matrices with the balanced intake of healthy nutrients. In materials science, fiber suspensions and composites have been developed as a versatile and successful approach to tailor rheology while imparting materials with added functionalities. Structures based on such types of physical (micro)fibers are however rare in food production mainly due to a lack of food‐grade materials and processes allowing for the fabrication of fibers with controlled sizes and microstructures. Here, the controlled fabrication of multi‐material microstructured edible fibers is demonstrated using a food compatible process based on preform‐to‐fiber thermal drawing. It is shown that different material systems based on gelatin or casein, with plasticizers such as glycerol, can be thermally drawn into fibers with various geometries and cross‐sectional structures. It is demonstrated that fibers can exhibit tailored mechanical properties post‐drawing, and can encapsulate nutrients to control their release. The versatility of fiber materials is also exploited to demonstrate the fabrication of food‐grade fabrics and scaffolds for food growth. The end results establish a new field in food production that relies on fiber‐based simple and eco‐friendly processes to realize enjoyable yet healthy and nutritious products.

Microstructured Biodegradable Fibers for Advanced Control Delivery

“…The rheological requirement of the thermal drawing can be extracted from oscillatory shear rheology where the relation between storage and loss moduli ( G′ and G″ ) determines the ideal drawing temperature window 19. It was found that the temperature window where G″ decreases slowly and dominates G′ , enables to control the flow and to achieve microstructured features 19,25…”

“…Here, we demonstrate the scalable fabrication of microstructured biodegradable fibers with multiple reservoirs of arbitrary size and position, spanning the entire fiber length, from which control release of unprecedented complexity can be achieved. We rely on the thermal drawing process, a versatile fiber‐processing approach particularly suited to fabricate complex multimaterial architectures 18–30. For the first time, we identified various grades of biodegradable amorphous thermoplastic polymers poly( d , l ‐lactic‐ co ‐glycolic acid) (PLGA) with the proper thermomechanical and rheological properties to be thermally drawn and maintain complex architectures and high mechanical strength.…”

Recent Advances in 1D Stretchable Electrodes and Devices for Textile and Wearable Electronics: Materials, Fabrications, and Applications

“…In the thermal drawing method, functional filaments can be effectively extracted with high throughput by passing the preform of filament with a large diameter into a furnace. Fink group advanced the thermal drawing method as a powerful tool for various multifunctional filaments for optical, electrical, chemical and bioelectronic applications . For electrophysiological recoding, Lu et al developed flexible and stretchable optoelectronic probing fibers from the mouse spinal cord by using the thermal drawing method (Figure k) .…”

High-efficiency super-elastic liquid metal based triboelectric fibers and textiles

“…Geniomer is a thermoplastic elastomer with interesting mechanical deformation properties and especially a low Young's modulus (E = 3.4 MPa), combined with a higher negative triboelectric polarity compared with PTFE. Geniomer also possesses the proper rheological properties to be compatible with the thermal drawing process, with a viscous flow-like behavior at high temperature 35,36 , as shown in Fig. 1b.…”