Wolfram Demonstrations: Free Interactive Software for Food Engineering Education and Practice

Abstract

The Wolfram Demonstrations Project on the web offers a freely downloadable interactive program, 'Mathematica Player', which can be used to view and manipulate about six thousands Demonstrations to date. They have been contributed by professionals and amateurs from around the world and include many that elucidate scientific and engineering principles through graphical displays. Some can also be used to do actual engineering calculations, and of these, about forty have been developed specifically for food and food engineering applications. The Project's Demonstrations are all esthetically attractive, give brief written explanations of the displays and provide short descriptions of the theory behind them. Each also gives typical or representative examples, which are shown with their corresponding parameter settings. Once a Demonstration is downloaded, the user can enter and modify the display parameters using sliders on the screen and watch the effect almost instantaneously. This makes the Demonstrations a powerful teaching and learning tool and an effective aid to professionals in routine engineering calculations. In this review, the food-related Demonstrations are briefly described and their potential role in Food Engineering education and practice is assessed.

Expanded Fermi Solution for Estimating the Survival of Ingested Pathogenic and Probiotic Microbial Cells and Spores

“…What is unique to the Wolfram Demonstrations is that the parameters for each plot can be entered and altered by moving sliders on the screen and/or by clicking on a box setter, and the display will be modified accordingly almost instantaneously. This enables the user to examine a large number of contemplated scenarios within a very short time (12).…”

Designing an Open-Source Interactive Simulation of Stokes’ Law

“…As a comparison, projects like Wolfram Demonstrations have been reported as useful tools for sharing educational demonstrations . The demonstrations can be previewed as animations, butat the time of writingdesktop software must be downloaded by the user who wishes to access interactive functionality.…”

“…As a comparison, projects like Wolf ram Demonstrations have been reported as useful tools for sharing educational demonstrations. 13 The demonstrations can be previewed as animations, but�at the time of writing�desktop software must be downloaded by the user who wishes to access interactive functionality. To create or edit demonstrations, a license for separate Mathematica software must be purchased, limiting the ability of educators and students to iterate on a demonstration or learn how such demonstrations are made.…”

Particle Characteristics and Their Impact on Physicochemical Properties of Delivery Systems

“…This may occur if there are insufficient polyelectrolytes present to completely cover the oil droplet surfaces or if the adsorption rate of the polyelectrolyte molecules is too slow to cover the droplets before they collide with each other. These stability maps can be generated using software that is freely available online (Normand et al 2010). Theoretical stability maps have been developed to predict the influence of polyelectrolyte characteristics (concentration and radius of hydration) and droplet characteristics (concentration and size) on the formation of stable multilayer emulsions, for example, Figure 6.13 (Cho and McClements 2009;McClements 2005b).…”