Structures in Food: Possibilities of Imaging and Diffusometry
Apart from chemical composition, structure is an important parameter which influences not only food processing schemes, but also product characteristics as taste/mouth feeling and finally shelf life. Structure analytics should be non-destructive and non-invasive, but also capable to determine structure of fluids as well as solids over several orders of magnitude of length and time scales. NMR imaging has been applied for almost all foods, and structural parameters as size distributions have been determined in wet and dry foods. As relaxation properties of foods vary, a variety of imaging techniques were explored. They range from single point imaging for short