Texture takes on heavy duty test

UK texture analysis designer and manufacturer Stable Micro Systems​ to unveil high speed, heavy duty texture analyser - the TA.Hdplus - at the Fi Europe exhibition in Frankfurt, Germany in November 2003.

Developed to have a maximum force capacity of 500kg (5kN), the company claims that its new texture analyser 'is the most powerful and flexible instrument for assessing texture in the food industry.'

According to a statement this week from Stable Micro Systems, the high resolution functionality of the established heavy duty texture analyser has been enhanced in the TA.HDplus to allow for minimum speeds of 0.01mm / second.

The company claims that higher test speeds - up to 20mm / second - can now be achieved with the new model. Speeds can also vary in proportion to the height of the sample, so products can be tested at a constant strain rate in compression or tension.

In a bid to improve functionality, writes the company, a number of other design features have been incorporated into the TA.HDplus texture analyser, for example a simple keypad is now integrated into the main body of the analyser to save desk space. In addition, peripheral instruments can be plugged into the instrument for multi-channel data acquisition.

The TA.HDplus texture analyser uses a fully integrated fourth generation Texture Exponent 32-bit software. According to the manufacturer, key advantages of this include thumbnails to allow the user to preview the file before it is opened, graphs, reports redesigned to use a more familiar word processing environment and a multi-language change facility.