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A tumbler mug is equipped with ultrasonic transducer to introduce ultrasonic vibrations to the drink / concoction held within. This can even be used to create suspensions of micellized droplets (eg. liposomes) to encapsulate certain nutrients.
Alternate idea: apply this idea to those Nutri-bullet
type blenders.
There may be various interesting nutrient concoctions that could be created this way, to facilitate absorption of nutrients following ingestion.
What nutritious concoctions do you like?
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Interesting. Eminently makeable. Probably marketable. I'm not sure how effective this could be made. |
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I have various ultrasonic devices around the lab: |
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A small jewelry-cleaner grade bath device, I use it for cleaning small bits of sciencey equipment. It's OK for the small amount of money it cost. It's main problem is that there are clearly regions where its effective and regions where nothing happens. |
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A special ultrasonic probe, around 30W max power but concentrated down to a point so that you can put a lot of power into small volumes of liquid, say 1-20ml. When you want to look at proteins in samples of tissue/cells and you break them up with detergent. The problem is the DNA comes with it, and DNA is EXTREMELY long, chromosome 1 is 4"/10cm or so and it makes a horrible stringy gloopy liquid that's difficult to handle in small volumes. We use ultrasonic cavitation to selectively smash up long DNA molecules. |
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If you have 96 samples however, this becomes tedious, so I bought another, larger bath device intended for cleaning engine parts etc. Much beefier ultrasonic power in the 100W range, volume around 3-4 liters, also has heating feature although 100W of ultrasonic heats the water on its own (a problem in this context, solvable with ice). This is much more robust at cleaning things, but I bought it for shearing DNA in many tubes at once. Which it does. Inconsistently. It suffers the same problems of regional power variations in the bath, probably because of constructive/destructive interference patterns in waves reflecting off the walls/objects. |
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A powerful ultrasonic probe does cause mixing in liquids, but it's not robust like a blender, a complex mix of juices, ice and fruit pieces etc. would represent a barrier, all the power would go into the section near the transducer and most would be unaffected. You'd need conventional blending first/as well. I'd fit a probe style device into the lid. |
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You'd need a killer application, something the ultrasonics could achieve that the blender couldn't. You'd probably just want to lock a few development chefs in a kitchen until they made something that looks interesting on QVC. |
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//There may be various interesting nutrient concoctions that could be created this way, to facilitate absorption of nutrients following ingestion.// |
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If you want to make a smoothie that hides a couple of celery sticks behind nicer flavors, great. But you're not unlocking any secret nutrition that only Blendex Co's unique blade design can achieve. |
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Digestion is pretty thorough, at least as much as is needed. We 1st smash up food with teeth, drop it into an acid bath to kill pathogens and incubate at 37C with endo peptidases to start chopping up larger proteins. Then we add detergent (bile) and unleash pancreatic juice, a diverse and complete mix of enzymes to degrade all relevant macromolecules. Absorption is continuous. After that we let the microbes have at it in the large intestine. What we can't degrade, they can, some of which they secrete and we absorb. |
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Are ultrasonic devices quiet? That could be a marketing angle.
Don't worry about a vessel; make it (as per [bs0u0155]) as part of a "one size fits all" lid.
Could you use 2 independent transducers running at different (variable) frequencies, to get interference at (much) lower frequencies that could break up chunks better?
Or possibly use the interference from multiple transducers to create standing waves & perhaps rotation?
Experiments must be done! |
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//Are ultrasonic devices quiet? That could be a marketing angle.// |
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You can't hear ultrasonic frequencies directly, by definition. You can hear something, I think its the collapse of micro bubbles. We can't use ultrasonic devices around experimental mice, they can hear it and a 100W transducer is going to be super loud. |
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Tune the transducers to create a Macarena on the surface of your 'healthy' smoothie. Or dancing fountains, a la Vegas. Health alone is boring. |
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