Patrick Wilms is a postdoctoral researcher at the laboratory of Food Process Engineering in close collaboration with Dr. Maarten Schutyser and Dr. Lu Zhang. He is involved in several PhD projects that involve dry separation processes, powder technology and paste rheology. Patrick worked for his PhD at the University of Hohenheim, Germany, on the flow behaviour of highly concentrated suspensions during extrusion processes. He obtained his BSc and MSc degree in Food Technology from Wageningen University & Research (both cum laude). Patrick’s current research focusses on the processing of food materials with low moisture content, having a special interest in multi-scale structuring of materials.

Dry Food Processing - WUR

Additive Food Assembly - WUR

Ongoing projects:

• PhD project (Koen Wetterauw) - Dry & Hybrid Fractionation for Plant-Based Ingredients (Project page)
• PhD project (Aaditya Venkatachalam) - Composition-texture decoupling of personalized 3D-printed food (PRINTYOURFOOD) (Project page) 
• PhD project (Nienke Eijkelboom) - Reducing energy use and material loss by better control of agglomeration during spray drying (Project page)
• PhD project (Ana Jauhari) - Spray drying for the encapsulation of plant-based extracted oils

Independent research:

From powder to paste: Processing food materials with low moisture content

• Characterization of powder flowability at dynamic flow conditions relevant to industrial applications.

Adequate material properties with respect to, among others, flowability, reconstitution behaviour and aroma retention are key to ensure their processability and resulting product quality/stability of dry food materials. Whether it is for a (spray)dried powder or a milled flour, by understanding the relation between the respective production processes and resulting material properties, improved functionalities can be ensured. In our current project we combine a dynamic powder flow tester with active temperature and humidity control, to improve the understanding of powder flow at conditions relevant to industrial applications. Obtained insights will be used to provide guidelines for efficient powder handling and formulate target specifications of agglomerated powders.

• 3Dstructuring: Structuring food products on the micron- and millimeter scale.

The flow behaviour of concentrated systems/pastes is inherently complex. This complexity, however, also provides the possibility to structure the material on both the macro- and microscale. To induce this multi-scale structuring, a special focus is put on 3D food printing, which shows great potential for individualized nutrition. In our current project we work with water-in-water emulsions, i.e. blends of two soluble polymers that phase separate, which are printed inside a fluid gel bath.