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New insight into the kinetic behavior of the structural formation process in agar gelation

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Abstract

Experimental investigations based on our custom-built torsion resonator were carried out on the kinetics and relaxation of the structural formation process in three agar–water solutions with agar concentrations of 0.75, 1.0, and 2.0 % w/w under natural cooling. An interesting temperature-dependent oscillatory decaying behavior of the structure development rate (SDR) in the agar gelation process is observed. This oscillatory SDR-decaying behavior is indicative of a sum of multiple SDR-determining relaxation processes and could be quantitatively described by a multiple-order Gaussian-like equation, i.e., \(dG^{\prime }/dt\equiv \sum \nolimits _{n=0}^{m}{dG^{\prime }/dt}^{(n)}=\sum \nolimits _{n=0}^{m}K_{n}{\rm exp}[-2(T-T_{n})^{2}/W_{n}^{2}]\). The \({\rm T}_{n}\) dependences of \({\rm W}_{n}\) in the gelation zone were also found to follow the Arrhenius law with activation energies of 39–74 kJ/mol for three investigated samples, indicating the important role of formation or fission of the hydrogen bonding interaction playing in the agar structural network formation. These findings provide insights into the mechanical properties and distinctive structure development rates of agar sols that dynamically and naturally evolve to form gels.

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Notes

  1. See www.scchengyi.com.

  2. See www.yudian.com.

  3. Note that the \(m\) value depended on the detecting time \((t)\) of the agar gelation process and the agar concentration and might be dependent on working frequency of the measuring torsion resonator, the final cooling temperature in experiments, as well as on the cooling rate. Further experimental studies on the physical mechanism of Eq. 1 will be reported in the near future, but the case of three agar–water solutions naturally cooled to room temperature was the only concerned in this work.

  4. The relaxation behavior of agar–water systems is more complicated than the Debye relaxation theory description (Nowick and Berry 1972; Su and Kê 1989; Stanley 1995; Nijenhuis 1997; Bohidar et al. 2002).

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the national physics base at Sun Yat-sen University (nos. J0630320 and J0730313).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies and School of Physics and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China

    Yi-Zhen Wang & Jin-Xiu Zhang

  2. Bioengineering Program and Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, Lehigh University, 19 Memorial Drive West, Bethlehem, PA, 18015, USA

    Yi-Zhen Wang & Xiao-Hui Zhang

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  1. Yi-Zhen Wang
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  2. Xiao-Hui Zhang
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Wang, YZ., Zhang, XH. & Zhang, JX. New insight into the kinetic behavior of the structural formation process in agar gelation. Rheol Acta 52, 39–48 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00397-012-0658-2

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