Abstract The flow of cracker dough is relevant to sheeting where material goes through rollers and is compressed rapidly to large total strains. Cracker doughs prepared in an internal mixer, with varying levels of water and sodium metabisulfite were subject to constant-area squeezing tests at 42 °C on 25.4 mm diameter, 7.5 mm thick disks immediately after mixing and after resting. Speeds were 2–200 mm/min, with 0.9 maximum strain. Squeezing forces increased with decreasing water and SMS contents and increasing speed and total strain; the influence of conditioning time was much less. Upon cessation of squeezing, the built-up stresses relaxed in less than 0.5 s. For squeezing at low speeds, a residual stress remained, indicating a yield stress; the residual stress decreased gradually with time. The Herschel-Bulkley equation gave quantitative agreement with data. Since the yield stress was found to be relatively small, all the data at high squeezing speeds could be described by the power-law fluids equation: the consistency index varied widely, but the power-law index ranged only between 0.3 and 0.5. The exception was response at the highest speed, largest strain and lower water content where larger than predicted stresses were observed, possibly due to jamming.
Albarakati et al. (Thu,) studied this question.