Extruder Laboratory

“The food extruder is considered a high-temperature short-time bioreactor that transforms a variety of raw ingredients into modified intermediate and finished products.” (J. M. Harper, 1979/1981).

The food extrusion process in its simplest form can be divided into a screw and a die section. A thermo-mechanical stress is applied in the screw section through the rotating screws as well as the tempered barrel. The existence of lab-scale extruders is very helpful in quality control and analysis of raw materials, optimisation of processing characteristics, and product development and recipe optimisation.

The screw is the crucial part of the extruder, everything revolves around it. In single-screw extrusion, the depth is decreased along the screw in a way to heighten the shear as materials are conveyed. This allows for breaking down of particles in the feeding zone, compression and thus pressurised in the metering zone. The design in a twin-screw extruder is rather different since the depth of the screws are kept constant. What changes is the screw configuration where we shall adjust each of the screw elements depending on the material feeded. The screw elements consisted of conveying and inverse elements and kneading and mixing blocks. This variety of arrangement of screw elements introduces a variety of applications and processes in twin-screw extrusion such as expansion and texturisation. Generally, the type of protein texturization is differentiated between wet texturization by high-moisture extrusion using a long cooling die and dry texturization with a basic round die head and lower water contents.

The Extruder Laboratory at the Faculty of Food Science and Technology was set up to be a research hub to allow food product development and optimisation. This laboratory aims to serve the goals of research and development in line with the Faculty’s and University’s vision and mission.

Our services are priced as stated in the table below:

*** Recommended charge for minimum three (3) hours usage

: Chromatography Laboratory, Ground Floor, Food 4 Building

Updated:: 03/02/2026 [nurulh]