Author: Leon van Riesen-Haupt

Reproducing Pringles Crispness Force Data under different Conditions

Two weeks ago I described the general trends we saw when analysing the force-displacement data from breaking Pringles that had been left unsealed for a varying number of days. I stated that the feature that showed most correlation with the age and hence the crispness was the amount of force peaks after the major force drop. We have since produced a graph showing this trend. The graph is displayed below, we used the standard error derived from the three sets of measurements at each age for the error bars.

To be absolutely sure that we found a trend we decided to redo the measurements under different conditions.

Update on our Progress – Automated Analysis Methods

In my last post I outlined our measuring equipment. We have since attached microphones to the equipment and have measured and recorded data for crisps. We started off looking at normal potato crisps, however, we soon realised that they were all different and it was impossible to get fair samples that only differed in age. We therefore, resorted to Pringles as they all have the same shape, texture and thickness.

We did measurements of singe Pringles to get a clear profile of the breaking but also did measurements with three Pringles stacked on top of each other to simulate a more realistic texture.

Trial Measurements and Data Handling

Our measuring instrument is a guillotine like device that we can use to break chips. For now we practiced with dry spaghetti as they are less messy and easily accessible. The two sensors we use are a load cell at the tooth of our guillotine to measure the force and a potentiometer to measure the displacement change as we move down. We filter the signal from the load cell using a self-made instrumentational amplifier and measure the voltages with an oscilloscope.

The photo of the oscilloscope output below shows a typical measurement outcome when breaking the spaghetti. The blue channel is proportional to the displacement while the yellow channel represents the force on the spaghetti.

Introduction and Summary of the Literature Review

Hi, my name is Léon and I am one of the students working on the physics of cooking project this year. We have had some problems with ICT and I have been meaning to post for a while since we have made a lot of progress. I think the best introduction to our work would probably be a quick summary of my literature review to give you an idea of the field in general.

I was quite surprised about the amount of literature on frying potatoes and about food in general. Scientists from all kinds of backgrounds have successfully applied objective methods and carefully thought through theories to cooking.