Ultrasound In The Food Industry

1. Definition:
Ultrasound is sound waves with a frequency that cannot be heard due to the limit of the human hearing. Some animals use ultrasound for navigation such as dolphins or for hunting such as bats using the information carried by the sound waves.1

2. Introduction:
In this assignment the non-thermal food process that was studied was ultrasound. In the following assignment ultrasound is looked at under different headings according to their use in the food industry. Ultrasound is looked at under what it can be used for in the food industry and the following assignment looks at ultrasound under three main headings 1. Drying 2. Effects on whey proteins

These products make a major contribution in the development of new food products. Milk proteins are usually isolated out of the milk by precipitation by the addition of an acid of the adjustment of the pH. This process usually involves the application of high heat and with this the pH is usually adjusted with leads to the denaturation of the whey proteins in the milk. Milk proteins are of major use in the production of cheeses, yoghurts, other dairy products, the baking industry and other food products. For the milk protein concentrate to be used in the industries it’s needed in the milk powder must be dissolved completely before it can be utilised. However, the milk powders are poorly soluble because of their high protein content (40–90%), which restricts their applications. It this experiment the aim was to investigate whether the use of ultrasound to dry out the milk to obtain the protein properties such as whey and casein without the use of pH adjustment or high heat so as not to denature the proteins. As previously stated the solubility of the milk proteins is the major key component that needed to be addressed and as shown in fig. 4( see below) there is a significant rise in the solubility of the proteins with a longer treatment by power

Pectin is used for many food products on the market today such jams, jellies and fruit juices. It is also used for functional purposes as well it is used as an emulsifier, stabiliser and thickening agent in food. In the traditional extraction process of pectin is using hot water between the temperatures of 60–100°C that has also been acidified with a mineral acid such as sulphuric, phosphoric, nitric, and hydrochloric or citric acid within the pH 1.5–3 for a half an hour to six hours. This process is very time consuming and with a product that is degrading fast which then leads to the pectin degrading. Which means the traditional way of heating extraction has both quantitative and qualitative disadvantages for pectin extraction. However using both heating and ultrasound together had a much more significant effect on the improvement of extractability, dissolution rate and degradation rate of pectin, and there existed a synergistic effect between ultrasound and heating on the extraction of pectin. Illustrated below in fig.1 shows two graphs showing the yields of pectin that was extracted with the higher power of the ultrasound and heating. In this experiment the ultrasound was set to 20