Science Spark : The purpose of this study was to determine to role of flake shape on the packing characteristics of popped popcorn

Let's be honnest, who would not immediatly click on the link when he receives the new publication alert for "Effect of flake shape on packing characteristics of popped popcorn" ? And the first sentence of the abstract just confirms this need : "The purpose of this study was to determine to role of flake shape on the packing characteristics of popped popcorn"

Sweley et al. simulated the filling of a movie theatre style packaging tub (14.0 cm bottom rim diameter, 17.0 cm upper rim diameter, and 15.4 cm tub height) with pop corn having different polymorphism (ie different shapes). Once they get a number, they checked by filling a real tub with real pop corn.

Results :

• Number of flakes to fill a tub agreed well between experiments and simulations.
• You can fill maximum 28% of your pack with pop corn , ie you pay for 72% of air when you buy pop corn in movie theather (in the best case!)
• 36.9% bilateral +63.1% multilateral polymorphism minimized the number of flakes to fill the tub : ie if you see a pop corn machine making about 1/3 of long pop corn and 2/3 of big cluster, you better get away , you are about to get ripped of.

Jess C. Sweley, Devin J. Rose, Xiaodong Jia, Richard A. Williams, David S. Jackson

Effect of flake shape on packing characteristics of popped popcorn

Journal of Food Engineering, Volume 127, April 2014, Pages 75–79

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jfoodeng.2013.11.028