Use of ramping and equilibrium water vapor sorption methods to determine the critical relative humidity at which the glassy to rubbery transition occurs in polydextrose.

Recent research has demonstrated that the critical relative humidity (RHc) values, obtained using automatic water vapor sorption instruments, can be used to detect the glassy to rubbery transition. However, reported time dependency of these RHc values suggests that additional research be carried out using equilibrium water vapor sorption methods. Thus, the objectives of this study were to: (1) determine the RHc for amorphous polydextrose at various temperatures using both instrumental (Dynamic Vapor Sorption [DVS] ramping and equilibrium) and saturated salt slurry methods, and (2) compare the RHc values obtained via sorption methods to the glass transition temperature (Tg) values obtained via differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).