Electrical engineering leads to... low-fat chocolate?

In news you don't hear every day, a team of physicists at Temple University in Philadelphia has made a discovery that could change the face of chocolate as we know it. According to a report on The Verge, the electrorheology research team has found an unusual application for electric fields.

Current manufacturing techniques require chocolate to have a high (up to 40%) fat content in order to keep it in liquid form during production. The researchers discovered that applying an electric field in the flow direction of a liquid stream of chocolate helped reduce its viscosity in that direction. The field polarises the cocoa particles, allowing them to be reoriented and aggregated, turning them into short chains which flow more easily. As a result of the application the liquid’s viscosity becomes anisotropic, which means it is reduced only in the flow direction.

Less viscosity equates to a lower minimum required fat content, with the Temple team claiming their approach can reduce the figure from 40 to 32%.

The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal and has been granted two patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office. It remains to be seen whether chocolate makers will be interested in adopting the method into their manufacturing, although the study did receive funding from confectionery giant Mars Incorporated.