
The Troll: A Chocolate Squishing Machine for Rheological Research
Here’s a video about an apparatus I built for a project investigating the rheology of industrial chocolate manufacturing. For legal purposes, at the time of recording, I couldn’t use the word “chocolate,” but yep, it’s chocolate!
I’ll update with some experimental results in the future, but for a quick summary:
The “Troll” is a two-roll laboratory scale model of a single stage of a five-roll refiner used in industrial chocolate production. The troll matches the surface properties and forces of it’s larger industrial cousins, with sensors and cameras to monitor the system response. The sensor and visual observation data collected is being used to validate computational models of the flow.
And here’s a few in-progress shots of the machine:
This project was lead by Levich Institude Director Dr. Jeffrey F. Morris, with postdoctoral researcher Dr. Michel Orsi, and sponsored by Mondelēz International.