Tube theory based analytics on the rheological behavior of wheat gluten dough

Small deformations of eight different wheat gluten doughs were examined by dynamic rheometer to investigate the dynamic rheological properties under frequency sweep of oscillation. Molecular dynamics based analytics was conducted with introduced Pierre Gilles de Gennes's tube theory to interpret the fundamental mechanism of rheological behavior of wheat gluten dough. The results show that transition temperatures of eight wheat gluten doughs are 52.6～58.5℃; between the temperature of 0.1℃ and 40℃, apparent activation energy, which is 4602.57～6511.16 J/mol, are calculated out according to time-temperature superposition method. Fitting in both Arrhenius and WLF modes generates the identical master curves. The correlations of parameters calculated by SPSS show that, below the transition temperatures, elastic moduli of temperature ramp with a fixed frequency of 1 Hz and elastic moduli of frequency sweep under different temperatures are significantly positively correlated; apparent activation energy and protein denaturalization temperature are considerably positively correlated. The research results provide some fundamental references for the wheat based production.