About us

The group’s process engineering research incorporates novel processing methodologies for functional structure tailoring in food systems and gastro-intestinal engineering with respect to optimizing structure disintegration and function release. These two fields demonstrate the causal relationships between food process, food structure and food product properties from the industrially processed food to its digested state. From this, an innovative reverse engineering approach has also been developed by the group, deriving - (i) optimized consumer-relevant food products with new functional structure and (ii) their processing by new technologies - from the properties/functions such food structure and its constituents trigger under processing, storage/distribution, food preparation or human digestion conditions in specific sections of the GI-tract from the mouth to the colon. 

The methodological scientific toolbox for process analyses contains the main tools of (i) processing experiments from micro-fluidics to pilot scale, (ii) non-equilibrium thermodynamics based and empirical modelling, as well as (iii) multi-scale numerical simulation from molecular dynamics to continuum mechanics. This is complemented by analytical and modelling tools for food material characterization with major expertise in non-Newtonian rheology, multi-scale bulk / interfacial structure characterization techniques using light- (SALS), neutron- (SANS) or x-ray- (SAXS, WAXS) scattering or diffraction as well as ultrasound and microscopic techniques (CLSM, SEM, TEM).