Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
0.6 m
0.5 m
Squeezing
cuff
Squeezing
cuff
0.0505 m
0.0305 m
0.12 m
0.12 m
Food side
(biopolymer)
Recipient side
(a)
Food
side
Recipient side
(b)
Fig. 10.6
A schematic (a) of the experimental set-up (b). For a colour version of this
figure, please see the colour plate section.
during the experiment to simulate the transport of low molecular weight
material across the gut wall into the blood stream.
Although in an early stage of development, this machine is starting to
reveal some interesting results. They suggest that rheological measure-
ments and understanding are important for what happens in the human
intestine and that the human intestine is amenable to chemical engineer-
ing measurements and models. This is demonstrated in Fig. 10.7, which
shows how the mass transport of sugar is affected by different guar
concentrations under different flow and mixing conditions. This data
shows how the squeezing mechanism increases transport at low guar
concentrations (low viscosities), but as the concentration is increased
(higher viscosities), there is little or no effect of flow rate or squeezing
action (Thakaran
et al
., 2010).
Although this is an interesting development, there is a long way to
go in terms of making it match the processes that occur in the flow of
foods within the intestine and in terms of the transport mechanisms that
occur across the membrane in a healthy individual. Future developments
are planned, whereby a live intestine (pig) is the membrane and where
techniques such as PEPT (Seville
et al
., 2005) are used to study the
