3rd International Symposium on Food Rheology and Structure

RHEOLOGICAL CHARACTERISATION OF CHEESE

SM Goh1, MN Charalambides1, S Chakrabarti2, JG Williams1
1

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College London, SW7 2BX, U.K.

2

General Mills Technology, Minneapolis, MN 55414 In addition, a block of process cheese was supplied by General Mills and was used in the wire cutting tests. The specimens were cut into rectangular shapes using a wire cutter and into cylinders using a borer. They were then wrapped in cling film and allowed to equilibrate at room temperature (21C) for at least two hours. All tests were performed at 21C using the Instron 5543 testing machine. Rectangular specimens of height 15mm, width 30mm and length 60mm were prepared for the three point bend test. The striker and the supports consisted of steel rods of 10mm diameter with the supports positioned at 50mm apart. For Gruyere, the tests were conducted at 5, 50 and 500mm/min. For mild Cheddar, the tests were conducted at two crosshead speeds, 5 and 50mm/min. A further test was also performed at 5mm/min using mild Cheddar specimens which were notched to a depth of 7.5mm at the plane of symmetry. The wire cutting tests for Gruyere and mild Cheddar were performed using wire diameters, d , of 0.25, 0.5 and 0.89mm as well as dowel pins of diameter 1.6 and 2mm. For the process cheese, wire diameters of 0.25, 0.345, 0.5 and 0.89mm were used. The dowel pins were sufficiently rigid, so the crosshead displacement was an accurate measure of the displacement of the pins. For the smaller wire diameters, the crosshead displacement had to be corrected for the deflection of the wire relative to the crosshead to obtain the actual wire displacement (Goh 2002). The specimens for the wire cutting tests were rectangular blocks of length 25mm, height 20mm and width 15mm for the smaller wire diameters. Blocks of length 30mm, height 30mm, and thicknesses 20mm and 30mm were used for the 1.6mm and 2mm diameters respectively. Three constant cutting speeds of 5, 50 and 500mm/min were used. The material calibration tests involved monotonic uniaxial compression tests performed at true strain rates of 0.25, 2.5 and 25/min, and relaxation tests

ABSTRACT
A scheme has been developed to characterise the strain and the time dependent behaviour of non-linear viscoelastic materials such as cheese in the form of a non-linear constitutive model. The model consists of two independent functions - a hyperelastic function to characterise the strain dependent behaviour, and a Prony series to characterise the time dependent behaviour. The calibration of the model is made using data obtained from monotonic uniaxial compression and stress relaxation tests. In order to verify the material parameters obtained from this scheme, experimental tests and finite element simulations of the three point bend and wire cutting tests of two cheeses were performed. The results from the finite element simulations showed good agreement with the experimental test data under various test conditions.

1. INTRODUCTION
Many foods such as cheese and dough exhibit large strain, viscoelastic behaviour. For these foods, both the strain and the time dependent mechanical behaviour must be characterised. In order that the constitutive models have good predictive capabilities, they have to be calibrated using consistent material data. However, for foods such as cheese, consistent material data is not obtainable because of the significant material variation between different blocks and batches (Prentice et al. 1993). Thus, the material data is not accumulative and has to be collected for each batch. Successful methods for characterising these foods would have to be simple, quick and be economical in terms of time and materials. In this study, a method for characterising the non-linear viscoelastic properties of cheese was investigated. These properties were then used in analysing three point bend and wire cutting tests.

2. EXPERIMENTS
Mild Cheddar and Gruyere samples were bought from a local supermarket and stored at 4C until testing. A separate block of each cheese was used for the three point bend and the wire cutting tests.

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performed at a true strain rate of 2.5/min up to a strain of 0.04. The specimens were cylinders with height 20mm and diameter 20mm. Prior to the start of test, the platens were lubricated with Superlube (Loctite Corp.) to eliminate the friction at the sampleplaten interface (Charalambides et al. 2001). Since separate blocks of each cheese were used to study the three point bend and the wire cutting tests, the material data, in the form of true stress, , and true strain, , were collected for each block separately. The true stress was calculated based on the assumption that the material was incompressible.

g +

g
i =1

=1

(3)

For non-linear, large deformations, the strain dependent behaviour is defined by a hyperelastic strain energy potential. The Prony series and the hyperelastic potential can be calibrated from ideal relaxation test data and the stress-strain relationship corresponding to instantaneous or long term deformation. However, it is often not possible to perform experiments under these ideal conditions, as is the case in this work. Under non-ideal test conditions, the test data can be described instead by the convolution integral,

3. NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS
The numerical simulations were performed in the commercial finite element code ABAQUS. In all models, four noded, plane strain elements were used to model the cheese. Because of symmetry, only half of the specimen was required. The striker and the support were modelled as rigid surfaces. The striker was prescribed to move at speeds which are identical to those in the experiments. The contact surfaces were assumed to be frictionless since preliminary results showed that the friction had a negligible effect on the bending force. For the wire cutting test, the focus of the finite element analysis was on the indentation of the wire into the specimen. This phase precedes the steadystate cutting phase where the wire makes a cut through the specimen. Only half of the specimen was included due to symmetry. The contact between the wire and the specimen was assumed to be frictionless since the friction was found to have a negligible effect on the indentation force.

(t ) = g (t s )

df ( ) ds ds

(4)

The solutions of the convolution integral can be fitted to experimental data to obtain the material constants in f ( ) and g (t ) . Although this direct method is feasible for some hyperelastic functions, such as the Mooney-Rivlin and polynomial strain energy functions (e.g. Miller 1999), the convolution integral can become intractable for other forms of hyperelastic functions. An alternative procedure to overcome this problem is to first calibrate the strain dependent behaviour with a polynomial expression given by,

f ( ) = A 4 + B 3 + C 2 + D

(5)

4. THEORY
In ABAQUS (ABAQUS 1998), the viscoelastic model consists of two independent components which represent the strain and the time dependent behaviour. During a step-strain relaxation test, the relationship between the stress and the time and strain can be expressed as,

where A , B , C and D are constants. In combination with the Prony series, the solutions to the convolution integral can be obtained and calibrated through a scheme as proposed in Goh et al. (2002). After equation (5) has been calibrated, it represents the stress-strain relationship under instantaneous (i.e. t =0, g (t ) =1 and = f ( ) in equation (1)), uniaxial compression state, to which other hyperelastic functions can be approximated. The fitting of the hyperelastic functions is made by inputting the stress-strain data calculated using equation (5) into ABAQUS. During the preprocessing stage, ABAQUS automatically approximates the input data with the chosen hyperelastic function. The Van der Waals hyperelastic potential was used in this work because it led to a good approximation of the data. Furthermore, it is also known to provide a more accurate prediction of the general deformation modes if the calibration of the material constants is based only on one test (ABAQUS 1998).

= f ( )g (t ) (1) where t is the time, and f ( ) and g (t ) are the strain and the time dependent functions respectively.
The time dependent behaviour in ABAQUS is defined by the Prony series, which is expressed as,

t (2) i i =1 where i are time constants and g i are dimensionless numbers, and, g (t ) = g +

g exp
i

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5. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Typical stress-strain curves of the cheeses used in the wire cutting tests are shown in Figure 1. The stress-strain data for the cheeses used in the three point bend tests also share similar characteristics. There was in general more scatter in the data for the process cheese. This was due to the sagging of the cheese under its own weight during the storage period which led to a rather inhomogeneous material.
100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 0 0.1 0.2 . =25/min . =2.5/min . =0.25/min

Waals hyperelastic constants. For the calibration, the values of i were arbitrarily chosen as 0.1, 1, 10, 100 and 1000 seconds for i equal to one to five respectively.
A (kPa) *mild Cheddar *Gruyere **mild Cheddar **Gruyere Processed -1100 -3100 -3250 -4440 6.6 B (kPa) 2040 4030 4050 5210 -8.5 C (kPa) -1330 -2040 -1950 -2380 -7 D (kPa) (kPa) 560 730 610 765 61.6 172 230 190 236 22.8

m
3.11 2.59 2.54 2.64 412

a 1.51 2.02 2.19 1.98 0.103

(a)
g1 *mild Cheddar *Gruyere **mild Cheddar **Gruyere Processed 0.312 0.117 0.304 0.221 0 g2 0.289 0.404 0.303 0.333 0.525 g3 0.109 0.128 0.114 0.117 0.233 g4 0.101 0.133 0.106 0.123 0.201 g5 0.109 0.108 0.089 0.097 0.040 g 0.080 0.110 0.084 0.109 0.000

stress (kPa)

(b) Table 1 Material parameters for (a) Strain dependent function (b) Time dependent function *Three point bend **Wire cutting/Indentation
0.3 strain 0.4 0.5 0.6

(a)
80 70 60 stress (kPa) 50 40 30 20 10 0 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 strain 0.4 0.5 0.6 . =0.25/min . =2.5/min . =25/min

The comparison between the experimental forcedisplacement curves in the three point bend tests and finite element predictions is shown in Figure 2. A good agreement is observed in general.
12 experimental 10 bending force (N) 8 6 4 2 0 0 2
5mm/min

500mm/min
50mm/min

finite element prediction

(b)
50 40 stress (kPa) 30 . =25/min

4 6 displacement (mm)

10

(a)
6 experimental finite element prediction 5mm/min 500mm/min

bending force (N)

. =2.5/min 20 10 0 0 0.3 0.6 0.9 strain 1.2 1.5 1.8 . =0.25/min

5 4 3 2 1 0 0

5mm/min notched specimen

(c) Figure 1 Stress-strain curves for (a) Gruyere (b) mild Cheddar (c) process cheese

4 6 displacement (mm)

10

The results of the calibration of the polynomial and the Prony series are shown in Table 1. Also included in Table 1 are the values of the Van der

(b) Figure 2 Bending force-displacement data (a) Gruyere (b) mild Cheddar

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The numerical predictions of the indentation forces are also in good agreement with the experimental data for all wire diameters. The results for three cases are shown in Figure 3. There was a small scatter in the data for Gruyere and mild Cheddar so the average values are shown. As mentioned earlier, there was considerable scatter in the data for process cheese and so the raw data are shown. These results show that the proposed scheme for obtaining the material constants is successful in characterising the strain and the time dependent material behaviour.
14
500mm/min

12 10 force (N) 8 6 4 2 0 0

50mm/min 5mm/min finite element prediction

The wire cutting models were further investigated for their ability to predict the steady-state cutting forces. For this task, a simple fracture criterion based on a critical strain was used. This fracture criterion was adopted, because the fracture strains remained relatively unchanged for the different strain rates for the cheeses. Thus, the critical strain, crit , was assumed to be equal to the fracture strain as measured in the uniaxial compression test. For mild Cheddar and Gruyere, the global fracture of the specimens were observed to occur around the peak in the curves. Thus, the fracture strains are approximately 0.5 and 0.45 respectively. For the process cheese, the specimens underwent a high degree of compression and when the specimen fractured, no drop in stress was recorded. From visual observations, the specimens appeared to fracture at strains of 1.4-1.6. In the finite element indentation models, the maximum tensile strain, xx,max , occurs at the line of symmetry in the direction normal to the movement of the wire. With increasing indentation, the value of xx,max increases monotonically. Thus, the changes in xx,max along the line of symmetry were monitored such that when crit was reached, fracture was assumed to occur. The numerically predicted indentation forces per unit width are compared with the experimental steady-state cutting data in Figure 4. Good agreement between the predicted values and the experimental data is observed. Thus, the critical strain criterion appears to be valid for the prediction of the cutting force. The validity of the indentation models to predict the steady-state cutting force does require further research. In the indentation models, it was found that surface friction had a negligible effect on the indentation load. However, theoretical considerations of the steady-state cutting stage (Kamyab et al. 1995) have predicted a large influence of the friction on the cutting force. Furthermore, it has been assumed that the fracture strain in tension was equal to the fracture strain in compression. Since the deformation of the material ahead of the wire is highly constrained, it was also assumed that the fracture strain was independent of the hydrostatic stress. It will be necessary that other independent tests such as the plane strain compression and the tension tests be performed to investigate the material behaviour in deformation states other than uniaxial compression. The modelling of the steadystate cutting stage will also be necessary to understand more fully the stress and deformation states as well as the effect of friction.

0.5 1 1.5 2 wire displacement (mm)

2.5

(a)
2 1.6 force (N) 1.2 0.8 0.4 0 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 wire displacement (mm) 1
500mm/min 50mm/min 5mm/min finite element prediction

(b)
0.7 0.6 0.5 force (N) 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 0 0.5 1 1.5 wire displacement (mm) 2
500mm/min 50mm/min 5mm/min finite element prediction

(c) Figure 3 Indentation force-displacement data (a) Gruyere, d=2mm (b) mild Cheddar, d=0.5mm (c) process cheese, d=0.25mm

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500
5mm/min

cutting force / width (J/m )

400 300

50mm/min 500mm/min finite element prediction

200 100 0 0 0.5 1 1.5 wire diameter (mm) 2

force-displacement curves were in good agreement with the experimental data for three point bend and indentation tests, suggesting that accurate characterisation of the strain and the time dependent behaviour of the cheeses was achieved. The indentation models were also successful in predicting the steady-state wire cutting force through the use of a critical fracture strain criterion.

REFERENCES
(a)

ABAQUSs user manual ver 5.8. Hibbitt, Karlsson and Sorensen (UK), Cheshire (1998) Charalambides MN, Goh SM, Lim SL, JG Williams: The analysis of the frictional effect on stress-strain data from uniaxial compression of cheese, J. Mater. Sci. 36, 2313-2321 (2001) Goh SM: An engineering approach to food texture studies. Ph.D. thesis, Imperial College London (2002) Goh SM, Charalambides MN, Williams JG: Large strain time dependent behaviour of cheese, J. Rheol., submitted (2002)

500 cutting force / width (J/m )

2

5mm/min 50mm/min 500mm/min

400 300 200 100 0

0

finite element prediction

0.5

wire diameter (mm)

1.5

(b)
160 cutting force/width (J/m )
2

Kamyab I, Chakrabarti S, Williams JG: Cutting cheese with wire, J. Mater. Sci. 33, 2763-2770 (1998) Miller K: Constitutive model of brain tissue suitable for finite element analysis of surgical procedures, J. Biomech. 32, 531-537 (1999) Prentice JH, Langley KR, Marshall RJ: Cheese Rheology, In Cheese: Chemistry, Physics and nd Microbiology, Volume 1, 2 ed. PF Fox, (Ed.) Chapman and Hall, London, 303-341 (1993)

140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 0

5mm/min 50mm/min 500mm/min

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 wire diameter (mm) 1

The authors would like to thank the BBSRC for financial support and General Mills for providing the process cheese.

(c) Figure 4 Prediction of steady-state cutting force for (a) Gruyere (b) mild Cheddar (c) process cheese solid line represents finite element prediction using crit =1.6; broken line represents finite element prediction using crit =1.4

6. CONCLUSIONS
Finite element simulations have been performed to model the mechanical behaviour of cheese. The material models were calibrated through an indirect approach, where the strain dependent behaviour was first characterised by a polynomial, which was then fitted with the Van der Waals hyperelastic function in ABAQUS. The time dependent behaviour was modelled using Prony series. The numerical

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