Monday, January 13, 2014

The Viscosity of Maple Syrup, and Other Breakfast Properties

The viscosity of a fluid depends on temperature and pressure. It measures how resistant to stress a material is, and is expressed in units of pressure times seconds.

There are a few important things about any material. Strength of the actual material, porosity (or how many pores are in a certain area), and permeability are a few properties.
But some would argue that the most important characteristic would be the fluid inside the material.

This is what I was thinking of when I poured a slightly viscous and mostly sweet non-Newtonian liquid over a layer of permeable pancakes. Those layers of the stack were deposited over time, just as sedimentary layers are.
Yet they resemble the flat overlapping volcanoes on the planet Venus.

Does a pancake's porosity correlate to its taste?
Is there an ideal permeability of the layers that the viscous liquid will have the ideal concentration in?

Grains are classified according to size. There are boulders, cobbles, pebbles, sand, silt, and clay.

The pebbles of coffee beans are eroded down to sand--coarse, medium, and then fine sand.
Depending on how strong I want the coffee to be, I grind it down to silt.

Grain size affects porosity.
Porosity affects strength.
Strength affects taste and how awake I am.

Two heaping scoops for every cup of water, and another scoop for good measure. And maybe another dash to prevent against weak coffee. A semi-quantifiable algorithm.

The tensile strength of bacon, the permittivity of orange juice, and the bulk modulus of scrambled eggs...

Perhaps a pancake's porosity correlates to taste, but taste is only semi-quantifiable as bleh, meh, delicious.

The taste of syrup is positively correlated to viscosity. Making my permeable pancakes filled with viscous maple syrup delicious along with my strong, light-absorbing coffee.

That is how you have physics for breakfast.