How does physics affect chocolate making?

Environmental/ Social Context

Producing smooth chocolate affects the environment. Maintaining the temperature, produces green house gases which causes global warming. Also, lowering or increasing the temperature, will increase the cost to maintain it. This will result in the product costing higher than it should be.

Implications of Physics in Chocolate making

The chocolate’s temperature can result in the chocolate being smooth and less viscous, but is dangerous when handling as hot liquids can result in injury. Also improvement in technology allowed us to measure viscosity of the fluid but since chocolate is not transparent and is dark, it will be very difficult to measure the viscosity. Therefore, viscosity of chocolate can only be measured by attaching a straw of a known length, which will be used to find velocity (=distance/time).

Experiment for measuring the viscosity of Chocolate

The chocolate should be placed in a tube, and the temperature of the chocolate should be recorded. Then a ball bearing with known radius attached to a gauge displaying distance. The ball bearing should be dropped and the terminal velocity should be recorded by using the time taken and the distance travelled. This then can be used within Stoke’s Law and rearranged to get viscosity. The force at terminal velocity is its weight – upthrust.

Sources:

Edexcel AS Physics – Ann Fullick, Patrick Fullick, Miles Hudson, Sue Howarth – Pearson (2008) Page 56, 59 and 73

The university of Virginia magazine page 25-29, by Lea Winerman – 2007

 -   - Monday, October 27, 2008