Final Report Summary - CAPS (Capillary suspensions: a novel route for versatile, cost efficient and environmentally friendly material design)
Suspensions are ubiquitous; a wide variety of materials including coatings and adhesives, emerging materials for nanotechnology products, as well as everyday food products are processed or delivered as suspensions. We can therefore use this capillary suspension concept to create smart, tunable fluids, stabilize mixtures that would otherwise phase separate, significantly reduce the amount organic or polymeric additives, and the strong particle network can be used as a precursor for the manufacturing of cost-efficient porous ceramics and foams with unprecedented properties. This stabilization and increase in strength has also been demonstrated using water based cocoa suspensions. The natural cocoa butter in the particles can be used to build a particle network and thicken the suspension to create a low fat chocolate spread.