Why to use fatty alcohol polyoxyethylene ether

People in the food industry often say that food additives are the soul of the food industry. The function of food emulsifier in food processing is very important.

But someone asked, why do you have to add something to a good "food"?

In fact, without food additives, many of the good things we love to eat will become completely speechless! For example, without emulsifier and thickener, soft and waxy ice cream is just like hard ice! Thanks to antioxidants, cooking oil doesn't have to worry about turning into Hala in a few days.

In food processing, there are four main purposes of using food additives:

1. In order to maintain or improve the nutritional value of food, such as vitamin C in concentrated juice;

2. Improve the quality of food, such as antioxidants. With them, the cooking oil at home doesn't have to worry too much about being harassed in a few days;

3. Improve the sensory characteristics of food, such as emulsifier and thickener in ice cream. Without them, ice cream is the same as ice block;

4. It's convenient for the production and circulation of food. You can see that the cans can go around the earth without any damage if they have preservatives.

Now we can buy all kinds of food in the supermarket every day. We never worry about having nothing to eat. But, you know what? This is largely due to food additives.

The formation of mesophase structure of emulsifier:

Emulsifier is a kind of homogeneous polycrystalline material. In the crystal, emulsifier molecules are arranged in opposite directions with polar groups, and lipophilic groups are parallel and closely arranged (see Fig. 5a). When the emulsifier is mixed with water and heated to kraffi temperature, the lipophilic gene (alkane chain) changes from solid state to chaotic liquid state due to the effect of heat energy. At the same time, water permeates into the hydrophilic group (polar group) of the emulsifier, forming a liquid crystal mesophase, i.e. mesocrystalline structure (Fig. 5b), also known as layered mesophase. According to temperature, concentration and chemical configuration of emulsifier, other mesophase structure can also be formed. If the temperature is increased further, the mesomorphic structure of the layered mesophase will be destroyed to form hexagonal columnar and cubic mesomorphic structure.

When the emulsifier of a homogeneous mesoporous structure is cooled to room temperature, the lipophilic group will recrystallize and arrange into regular lattice. The same volume of water is still between polar groups, forming a gel composed of bimolecular lipid compounds and water layers alternately (Fig. 5C).

The outer layer of emulsifier bimolecular layer is hydrophilic group, which combines with water directly. Bimolecular layers pile up with each other to form a bimolecular layered structure. When the emulsifier is liquid (above the characteristic temperature TK of Kraft), the hydrocarbon chain is in a state of free movement, making the molecular behavior similar to liquid.