A new biomimetic set-up to understand the role of the kinematic, mechanical, and surface characteristics of the tongue in food oral tribological studies

A biomimetic tribological set-up was developed to better integrate physiological characteristics in oral friction studies. Polyvinyl alcohol was used to design tongue-mimicking samples (TMSs) with controlled bulk rigidity and surface roughness. The set-up allowed normal stresses and sequences of shearing motion to be applied between a TMS and a rectangular aluminum plate mimicking the hard palate. Cottage cheese with and without suspended microcrystalline cellulose particles of two sizes (small: 15 μm and large: 250 μm) was used as the model food in the experiments, making it possible to introduce heterogeneities well above the perception threshold, which often get excluded in conventional tribology studies.