Computer Simulation of the Pre-Heating, Gelation, and Rheology of Acid Skim Milk Systems - Food Colloids: Self-Assembly and Material Science - page 281

3

reference sample

high pH

2.5

2

medium pH

low pH

1.5

1

0.5

0

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140

Time

Figure 9 Average number of bonds per whey protein particle during the gelation phase.
All systems show more or less the same behaviour. The high pH and untreated
systems even have slightly more bonds, as less are bonded to the large particles.
The final structure has about 2.5 pair bonds per particle, implying that each
whey particle is bound to about 5 neighbours

10000

low pH
medium pH
high pH
reference

1000

100

10

1

1 10 100

Radius (r)
Figure 10 Number N of small particles within a sphere of radius r around a central small
particle as a function of that radius. The fractal dimension D is given by the
scaling relation N B r D . A value of about D ¼ 1.7 is found for all systems. The
number of neighbours in the first shell at r ¼ 2 is around 5, in accordance with
the number of bonds (from Figure 9.)