Sensitivity of a Bubble Growth to the Cheese Material Properties during Ripening

In this study, a model of transport phenomena describes a single bubble growth in semi-hard cheese. Carbon dioxide production, its transport to the bubble interface, equilibrium laws and mechanics were coupled. Semi-hard cheese mainly behaves as elastic when loads are quickly applied to a piece of cheese like during chewing (few seconds). However, when slowly loaded with increasing gas pressure during ripening in warm room, the mechanical cheese behavior can be simply modelled as a viscous material (Grenier et al. [9]). It is true, as long as viscosity remains low compared to the rate of gas production. This paper investigates a wider range of viscosity (from core = 6:32 107Pa:s to rind = 2:88 108Pa:s) than that used in previous studies. FEM simulations have shown that higher viscosities encountered close to the rind of a cheese block can partly explain the increase in gas pressure within bubbles from the core to the rind (up to 3.4 kPa). These results confirm that mechanics does not really control the evolution of bubble volume in cheese. However, mechanics can explain greater pressure observed close to the rind even if gas production is lower than at core.