PhD Studentship: Optimising salt morphology and maximising oral perception of salt through DEM and DEM-CFD techniques

The Food Consortium CTP is looking for a PhD candidate for the BBSRC funded project Optimising salt morphology and maximising oral perception of salt through DEM and DEM-CFD techniques.

The Food Consortium CTP comprises four major food manufacturers together with the largest UK-based independent science and technology provider and trainer for the food industry (Campden BRI), and the Haydn Green Institute (Nottingham University Business School).

This industry-led collaborative programme will develop highly skilled PhD researchers and provide an innovation ecosystem through collaboration and partnership. As a successful PhD candidate you will be part of a larger cohort of students with the opportunity to form strong links to industry and be part of a supportive network of peers, academic supervisors, industrial supervisors and training partners.

Business facing training will include concepts and issues to consider when commercialising early-stage science and technology, using tools to help evaluate innovation and commercialisation strategies.

About the Project

The aim of this project is to understand the detailed mechanisms of the release of salt and other flavours during breakdown and transport to the receptors through numerical simulations. The focus of this project will be on developing the capability for modelling the formation and dynamics of bolus in a realistic oral cavity and to predict the rate of dissolution of salts with different grain types. This information could then be correlated to the perception of flavours by consumers.

The successful candidate will first focus on modelling the final dissolution mechanism. The salt transport during the mastication will be simplified to the dissolution of different salt types in a stationary fluid. It is assumed that the dissolution curves produced in this manner are correlated with the dissolution curves in an actual process. Such models can be built with sufficiently high-fidelity to enable testing of different salt types with all the morphological details. More complicated models will then be built step-by-step by introducing model flow patterns (hence including advection), adding other flavouring particles, static geometry of the oral cavity and dynamics of the tongue by introducing a fully-resolved CFD strategy such as a coupled Discrete Element-Immersed Boundary technique.