In recent years, aging is progressing in Japan. Elderly people can't swallow the food well. So, the need of soft food is increasing greatly with the aging of the population. There are so few satisfying foods for the elderly to enjoy a meal. An equipment of printing soft food gives the elderly a big dream and is promising. In this study, we aim at developing a 3D edible gel printer in order to make soft food for the elderly. We made a prototype of the 3D edible gel printer. The printer consists of syringe pump and dispenser. The syringe pump extrudes the solution. The dispenser allows to model threedimensional objects. We use agar solution as the ink to carry out the printing. Agar’s gelation deeply depends on temperature. Therefore temperature control of the solution is important to mold optimal shapes because the physical crosslinking network of agar’s solution is instable. We succeeded in making the gels and plate-shape gel using the 3D edible gel printer. Further more, in order to increase the gelation speed agar’s solution, we changed the dispenser and the printing test is being done now. 4 kinds of soft food prepared from agar and gelatin were printed by the 3D edible gel printer. The compression tests of the printed soft food samples were done and their hardness is measured because the hardness is one of very important factors which influence the food texture greatly. In the future, the viscosity of the agar solution or other food ink should be adjusted to suitable for printing.
In the past decade, several high-strength gels have been developed. These gels are expected to use as a kind of new engineering materials in the fields of industry and medical as substitutes to polyester fibers, which are materials of artificial blood vessels. The gels have both low surface friction and well permeability due to a large amount of water absorbed in the gels, which are superiority of the gels compering to the polyester fibers. It is, however, difficult for gels to be forked structure or cavity structure by using cutting or mold. Consequently, it is necessary to develop the additive manufacturing device to synthesize and mode freely gels at the same time. Here we try to develop an optical 3D gel printer that enables gels to be shaped precisely and freely. For the free forming of high-strength gels, the 1st gels are ground to particles and mixed with 2nd pregel solution, and the mixed solution is gelled by the irradiation of UV laser beam through an optical fiber. The use of the optical fiber makes one-point UV irradiation possible. Since the optical fiber is controlled by 3D-CAD, the precise and free molding in XYZ directions is easily realized. We successfully synthesized tough gels using the gel printer.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.