DEVELOPMENT OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL MEASUREMENT METHOD FOR ICE CRYSTALS IN FROZEN LIQUID FOODS

A Micro-Slicer Image Processing System (MSIPS) has been applied to observe the ice crystal structures formed in frozen dilute solutions. Several characteristic parameters were also proposed to investigate the three-dimensional (3-D) morphology and distribution of ice crystals, based on their reconstructed images obtained by multi-slicing a frozen sample with the thickness of 5µm. The values of characteristic parameters were determined for the sample images with the dimension of 530 x 700 x 1000µm. The 3-D morphology of ice crystals was found to be a bundle of continuous or dendrite columns at any freezing condition. The equivalent diameter of ice crystals were in the range of 73µm to 169µm. At a temperature of a copper cooling plate of-40℃, the volumes of ice crystals were in the range of 4.6 x 104µm3 to 3.3 x 107µm3, and 36 ice columns were counted in the 3-D cubic image