Press Releases

2009-09-22

UNILEVER uses VSG Avizo® Fire 3D Visualization and Analysis software in food and beverage industry

UNILEVER uses Avizo® Fire to visualize and understand food and detergent structures

Food and detergent products are composed of complex micro structures. Modern microscopic techniques can make them visible. The microstructure greatly affects macroscopic properties such as appearance, taste, mouth feel and solubility. Making these structures visible and quantifying them is essential to the development of products with optimal product properties. A broad range of imaging techniques is used to visualise microstructure elements at different length scales. For example, X-ray microtomography (μCT) is used to reveal the real 3D structure at μm-mm level and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) at nm levels.

To understand structure property relations it is important to know the interaction between structure elements and to obtain information about structural changes in time. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used to analyze the structural changes in food and detergents during processing and storage. The internal 3D structure at sub mm level, the water distribution and status can be visualized in real time.

The information density of the images produced by these imaging techniques is very high and has to be converted to physical interpretable information. This can be done by multi-dimensional visualization and image analysis. Image visualization reveals the actual 3-D structure, which is difficult to recognize from 2-D sections. Avizo® Fire is used for image visualization. In this case, it runs on a 64-bit platform and is very powerful to handle large data sets. It provides a viewer with a real sense of the structure. Avizo Fire offers powerful tools for Unilever’s applications, especially the interactive cropping tool and segmentation editor (e.g. for difficult-to-segment noisy MRI images). The 3-D models created by Avizo Fire are exported and analyzed by other software packages.

 

About Unilever

Unilever is the biggest combined global foods and home and personal care Company in the world. One in every two households in the world has a Unilever product in their home.
For further information visit www.unilever.com

 

About Avizo® software suite

Avizo® 3D software is a powerful, multifaceted tool for visualizing, analysing, and understanding scientific and engineering data. Avizo delivers advanced 3D graphics and analysis capabilities for materials science, physical and environmental sciences, geosciences, computer-aided engineering, and generic scientific activities. Avizo offers abundant state-of-the-art features within an intuitive workflow and easy to-use graphical user interface.
For further information visit www.avizo3d.com

 

About Avizo® Fire

Avizo Fire offers a broad range of software tools for obtaining and visualizing advanced qualitative and quantitative information on complex material structure images. Avizo Fire delivers powerful visualization and analysis capabilities for numerous applications in materials science, including materials characterization, material microstructure evolution, surface analysis, quality control, nanotechnology, crystallography, industrial tomography and non-destructive investigation. Based on Open Inventor® by VSG, Avizo Fire offers a comprehensive, versatile, scalable application framework that addresses all aspects of 3D data visualization, processing, analysis, and presentation.
For further information visit www.vsg3d.com/vsg_prod_avizo_fire.php

 

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