A delicious meal of 'printed food', meets 3D food printing.
- 생명공학대학
- Hit2242
- 2019-03-27
Sooner or later, you may be able to pick out the food you want and eat it at home. This can be possible because the fourth industrial revolution has been integrated with conventional food engineering and a new technology called "3D Food Printing" has emerged.
While an ordinary 3D printer makes products using solid materials such as plastics, the 3D food printer produces foods such as pizza and pasta by printing edible materials. Still, it is unimaginable in Korea to have 'printed food'. In Europe, however, 3D food printing technology is well-known as it has been actively researched since the 2000s and people have already been selling 3D printed food.
Currently, most 3D food printers print food by stacking up materials. When you type the recipe into a 3D food printer, it adjusts the position of the nozzle and builds up the material. Therefore, products can be manufactured exactly just like the user designed.
"When a recipe-program designates a three-dimensional coordinates according to x, y and z axes, the printer outputs the material in the appropriate location to form a shape of food," said prof. Lee Jin-kyu of Department of Food Engineering at Ewha Womans University.
Although the basic principle of making food by layer is same, the principle of operation varies slightly depending on unique nature of ingredients. Prof. Lee Jae-hwan of Department of Food Science and Biotechnology at Sungkyunkwan University said, "The viscous material maintains its form just by stacking one layer from the bottom through extrusion-layers, but the powder-type material requires a process of solidifying each layer with a laser.“
In addition, temperature could be changed during pre-/ post-processing procedures depending on material characteristics, or materials could be hardened by using powder. Through this variety of processing methods, 3D food printers extract materials of different qualities at the same time and also can print products with similar taste and texture to ordinary foods.
This is a translation of a summary for the orignal article written by Jung Myeong-eun, A University Newspaper. (You can read the orignal in korean at http://www.snunews.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=19198)
And the thumbnail image is downloaded from https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/news/3d-food-printing-technology-help-people-chewing-difficulties