Morphometric Analysis of Transverse Surface of Fractured Maltodextrin Agglomerates.

Fracture creates complex surfaces. The aim of this work was to characterize the irregular surface generated in the fracture of maltodextrin thick-agglomerates using gray level intensities and texture features extracted by digital image analysis. Results showed that particle size had no significant effect on texture features and had a significant interaction with load. A 50 N load caused rougher surfaces, while a 500 N load produced smooth surfaces. Obtained values of texture fractal dimension were not higher than 2.23 and were related to image entropy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]