糖心原创

Project description

 

When you eat chocolate it breaks into pieces, the cocoa butter melts just below body temperature, and millions of tiny sugar crystals dissolve in saliva. How it feels and tastes depends on how fast all of this happens. Following every crystal is hopeless. Instead you describe the whole crowd at once with a size distribution. It obeys a conservation law much like a transport PDE, except that the "position" is particle size. Even that is too much, so in practice you track only a few averages, such as total mass, mean size and spread. The catch is that not every set of averages can come from a real distribution, and a careless approximation can produce negative mass. This project builds reduced models that always stay physically possible, and couples them to melting and diffusion in the mouth. There is potential to work with Mondelez on how recipe and structure change flavour release, but the PhD is the mathematics.