UK company Stable Micro Systems, a leading provider of texture analysis equipment, has designed and launched its new Acoustic Envelope Detector, the company confirmed this week.
Used with the TA.XTPlus texture analyser, Stable Micro Systems claims that the new instrument offers manufacturers a quick and easy method of collecting and analysing the noise released by crispy products as they are deformed.
An indicator of freshness and high quality, crispness is a pivotal factor in determining the appeal of crunchy and crispy products such as biscuits, cereals, crisps and hard varieties of fruit and vegetables. One of the most prominent characteristics of crunchy and crispy foods is the acoustic energy emitted upon their disintegration during chewing or mechanical testing.
The company claims that with the new Acoustic Envelope Detector, acoustic data can now be analysed easily using small and manageable files in the region of 20KB per test.
Design features of the Acoustic Envelope Detector for testing brittle products include a highly sensitive directional microphone, mounted close to the sample product, which picks up only relevant high frequencies emitted by crispy foods and filters out those emitted by the texture analyser itself.
Force, distance, time and acoustic data can be acquired at very high speeds of up to 500pps (data points per second) - an important feature when testing crispy products that break quickly. Acoustic and force curves can be viewed at the same time so that relationships between acoustic and force events can be easily identified.