Viscoelastic and Time Dependant Behavior of Tomato Paste

This paper is concerned with rheological behavior of tomato paste from the view point of viscoelasticity and time dependant properties in order to design various units of tomato paste production line. Rheological behavior of tomato paste is determined at Spindle Brookfield viscometer. Experiments were carried out and determined that time dependant category of the samples show thixotropic behavior. Both stress overshoot and step strain tests emphasized the viscoelastic property of the sample, therefore the appropriate model were obtained to define the viscoelastic and time dependent behavior. This work exhibited one model which consisted of time dependent and viscoelastic rheological behavior of tomato paste. The results of the model are compared with experimental data which indicated good correlations between model result and experimental data. The experimental results showed that tomato paste behaves as a non-Newtonian semifluid which follows power law model.