Mechanical properties of wax-oleogels: Assessing their potential to mimic commercial margarine functionality under small and large deformations.

Utilizing waxes to gel oils presents a viable approach for diminishing trans and saturated fat levels in commercial fats such as margarines. This technique ensures that oleogels mimic traditional fats in terms of rheological properties, oil-binding capacity, and overall structure. Our study employed cooling-shear rates to finely adjust physical characteristics, evaluating rheology via SAOS-LAOS, oil retention, and crystal structure of wax oleogels, compared against commercial margarines as benchmarks.

Thermoresponsive oil-continuous gels based on double-interpenetrating colloidal-particle networks.

Gels composed of multicomponent building blocks offer promising opportunities for the development of novel soft materials with unique and useful structures. While interpenetrating polymer networks have been extensively studied and applied in the creation of these gels, equivalent strategies utilizing colloidal particles have received limited scientific and technological attention. This study presents a novel class of thermo-responsive apolar double gels from interpenetrating networks of attractive colloidal silica and lipid particles.

Concentration-independent mechanics and structure of hagfish slime.

Unlabelled: The defense mechanism of hagfish slime is remarkable considering that hagfish cannot control the concentration of the resulting gel directly; they simply exude a concentrated material into a comparably "infinite" sea of water to form a dilute, sticky, cohesive elastic gel. This raises questions about the robustness of gel formation and rheological properties across a range of concentrations, which we study here for the first time. Across a nearly 100-fold change in concentration, we discover that the gel has similar viscoelastic time-dependent properties with constant power-law exponent (α=0.

Linear and nonlinear rheological behavior of fat crystal networks.

Fats are ubiquitous in biological membranes, foods, and many other commercial products. In these, they play essential roles in biological, nutritional, and physical functions. In this review, we focus on physical mechanical functions.