The Art of Making Chocolate

Introduction

Chocolate and its varied forms (candy bars, cocoa, cakes, cookies, coating for other candies and fruits) are probably most people’s favorite confection. Chocolate is a raw or processed food produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. Cacao has been cultivated for at least three millennia in Mexico, Central, and South America, with its earliest documented use around 1100 BC. The majority of the Mesoamerican people made chocolate beverages, including the Aztecs, who made it into a beverage known as Xochitl, a Nahuatl word meaning "bitter water.” The seeds of the cacao tree have an intense bitter taste and must be fermented to develop the flavor.


Raw Materials

The primary components of chocolate are cocoa beans, sugar or other sweeteners, flavoring agents, and sometimes potassium carbonate (the agent used to make so-called dutch cocoa).

The Manufacturing Process

Once a company has received a shipment of cocoa beans at its processing plant, the beans are roasted, first on screens and then in revolving cylinders through which heated air is blown. Over a period of 30 minutes to 2 hours, the moisture in the beans is reduced from about seven percent to about one percent. The roasting process triggers a browning reaction, in which more than 300 different chemicals present in the cocoa beans interact. The beans now begin to develop the rich flavor we associate with chocolate. Roasting also causes the shells to open and break away from the nibs (the meat of the bean). This separation process can be completed by blowing air across the beans as they go through a giant winnowing machine called a cracker and fanner, which loosens the hulls from the beans without crushing them. The hulls, now separated from the nibs, are usually sold as either mulch or fertilizer. They are also sometimes used as commercial boiler fuel. Next, the roasted nibs undergo broyage, a process of crushing that takes place in a grinder made of revolving granite blocks. The design of the grinder may vary, but most resemble old-fashioned flour mills. The final product of this grinding process, made up of small particles of the nib suspended in oil, is a thick syrup known as chocolate liquor.
The next step is refining, during which the liquor is further ground between sets of revolving metal drums. The widely-used machine is roll mill (2 or 3 rolls). It has been recorded that the three roll mill was used to mill chocolate as early as 1915. Each successive rolling is faster than the preceding one because the liquor is becoming smoother and flows easier. The ultimate goal is to reduce the size of the particles in the liquor to about .001 inch (.00254 centimeters).
If the chocolate being produced is to be cocoa powder, from which hot chocolate and baking mixes are made, the chocolate liquor may be dutched, a process so-named because it was invented by the Dutch chocolate maker Conrad van Houten. In the dutching process, the liquor is treated with an alkaline solution, usually potassium carbonate, that raises its pH from 5.5 to 7 or 8. This increase darkens the color of the cocoa, renders its flavor beoming milder, and reduces the tendency of the nib particles to form clumps in the liquor. The powder that eventually ensues is called dutch cocoa.

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This information is brought to you by Torrey Hills Technologies, LLC. We export Heat sinks, Belt Furnaces, and Three Roll Mills to 60+ countries and are located in San Diego, CA 92121.


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What is 5G?

5G (from "5th Generation") is the latest generation of cellular mobile communications. It succeeds the 4G, 3G, and 2G. 5G performance targets high data rate, reduced latency, energy saving, cost reduction, higher system capacity, and massive device connectivity.
Like the earlier generation 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile networks, 5G networks are digital cellular networks, in which the service areas covered by providers is divided into a mosaic of small geographical areas called cells. Analog signals representing sounds and images are digitized in the phone, converted by an analog to digital converter and transmitted as a stream of bits. All the 5G wireless devices in a cell communicate by radio waves with a local antenna array and low power automated transceiver (transmitter and receiver) in the cell, over frequency channels assigned by the transceiver from a common pool of frequencies, which are reused in geographically separated cells. The local antennas are connected with the telephone network and the Internet by a high bandwidth optical fiber or wireless backhaul connection. Like existing cellphones, when a user crosses from one cell to another, their mobile device is automatically "handed off" seamlessly to the antenna in the new cell.

Their major advantage is that 5G networks achieve much higher data rates than previous cellular networks, up to 10 Gbit/s; which is faster than current cable internet, and 100 times faster than the previous cellular technology, 4G. Because of the higher data rates, 5G networks will serve not just cellphones but are also envisioned as a general home and office networking provider, competing with wired internet providers like cable. Previous cellular networks provided low data rate internet access suitable for cellphones, but a cell tower could not economically provide enough bandwidth to serve as a general internet provider for home computers.

5G networks achieve these higher data rates by using higher frequency radio waves, in or near the millimeter wave band from 30 to 300 GHz, whereas previous cellular networks used frequencies in the microwave band between 700 MHz and 3 GHz. (Source: Wikipedia)
One of the technology drivers behind it is called RF (Radio Frequency) and Microwave Packaging. Radio frequency (RF) If you're interested in learning more about 5G check out the book RF and Microwave Microelectronics Packaging from Springer.


Will you be getting a phone that has 5G capabilities?




      Check out the Book

This information is brought to you by 
Torrey Hills Technologies, LLC
San Diego, CA 92121.


We export Heat sinks, Belt Furnaces and Three Roll Mills to 60+ countries.

Contact Us:
1 858-558-6666
Sales@torreyhillstech.com

Visit us on social media:
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How To Get Rid of Agglomerations in Cosmetics

From the lab at Torrey Hills Technologies


Cosmetic Overview

Cosmetics are broadly classified into basic types such as lotions, creams, foundations, lipsticks, rouges, eyeliners, mascaras, eye shadows, eyebrow pencils etc.. The cosmetic should exhibit aesthetic qualities such as the color, which can be either a transparent or opaque and shouldn’t deteriorate in quality over time. 

The Makeup of Makeup
Makeup composition mainly includes pigment, fatty binder, and filler. Cosmetic products must be homogeneous and stable during the application. Basically, the pigment raw material has a relatively large and irregular particle. The pigment is usually ground in a ball mill to reduce the pigment particle size. In this step, the pigment can go down to about 10-15 microns. However, a reagglomeration of the various particles is observed after the above grinding and drying. Due to the agglomeration, the compositions are visually unappealing, often unstable, and cover poorly. Therefore, pigments and other ingredients in the cosmetic need to be further ground through a milling apparatus to form a homogeneous and finely dispersed paste the ideal pigment particle size should be in 10-30 nm.

Dispersion

There are many different ways to mix raw cosmetic material, such as Sand Mills, Colloid Mills, and Three Roll Mills. Each works differently but all subject the mixture to sheer force.

Sand Mills

Sand Mills are vertical cylinders filled with grinding media, operate on the principle that small mill media stir rapidly in the presence of the pigment slurry. Dispersion takes place as a result of pigment shearing as it rises through shaft impeller. Dispersion of the pigment depends strongly on the media size. Therefore, the use of sand mills makes it difficult to decrease the particle size to the nano range.

Colloid mill

The Colloid mill uses stone grinding discs. The upper stone is stationary and the lower stone is rotating fast at speeds up to 3600 revs per minute. The low viscosity slurry is fed into the center of the static top stone by gravity and is passed between the two stones by centrifugal force, where it is subjected to extreme turbulence and shear forces to affect the dispersion. Colloid mill can reach the very fine particle size but with a limitation on the size of batch material since it is small. 

Three-Roll Mills

Three-roll mill consists of three rollers which are made from chilled steel or granite, run parallel to each other, and each one rotates at a different speed. Additionally, each contact face passes in the opposite direction to the adjacent roller. The gap between them, called the nip, can be adjusted. The mill base is fed into the nip between rollers one and two and the final product is taken from roller three by means of a scraper bar. Among these mills, the three-roll mill is preferred since all paste compositions are subject to the sheer force when they go through the gap. Therefore, the more homogenous structure can be reached by this process. The particle size could go down to nanosize range. The gap between the rolls may be adjusted to control the fines of dispersion. The loading capacity could be easily adjusted through the machine design.

Read More: Click Here
See a Three Roll Mill in Action: Click Here

Cultured Meat

How Torrey Hills Technologies Shaking Incubator is Helping for a Sustainable World

       According to Hamptons Creek, a Silicon Valley startup, working on cellular agriculture products, the production of meat and seafood around the globe will double to 1.2 trillion pounds by 2050 if we keep consuming at our current rate. However, our planet is not able to support the supplies that the animal production industry requires for example water, fertilizer, fuel, and pesticides. By 2050 Earth’s population will be approximately 9 billion and meat consumption is estimated to rise 70% in the next three decades – the solution must lie in technology – lab-grown meats can help offset the environmental damages for future generations.

A campaign such as Meatless Mondays, Be Vegetarian or Go Vegan have become more and more frequent and people are aware of meat nutrition and future consequences. Now there is a sustainable revolutionized food option: the clean meat industry where meat is made from cells instead of lives, or confined animals. All is possible, to produce milk without cows and nuggets without chickens. There are many startups working in this new industry in a job that is called digital biology or synthetic biology – it converts the genes of yeast cells in a vitro meat process to generate milk but with no cows.

Here is how

      The process starts taking some cells from the muscle of an animal with a small biopsy while they're under anesthesia. These cells are called “myosatellite” cells which are the stem cell of muscles and have the function to generate a new muscle tissue when the muscle becomes injured. Producing clean meat is also known as cultured meat, comes essentially from stem cells. The same thing that occurs inside an animal, the cells will proliferate when placed for growth. What they use to grow this meat is called a shaking incubator. When they are in action they make the whole process turn into future clean meat. All of this from a small sample cell that proliferates until there are trillions of cells, just from one sample it is possible to produce 800 million strands of muscles tissue and make around 80,000 quarter pounders. The clean meat is ready when all these fibers are layered together. It is possible to process using the same food methods, for example, a grinder to make ground beef. There are no antibiotics, genetic modification, environmental damages and animal slaughter which comes with traditional meat production. The cells are doing the same work that they would normally do inside the animals but with technology to help in favor of a better future for us.

Click Here to learn more about shaking incubators.