RELAPP: A New Portable Electronic Rheometer for the Analysis of Viscoelastic Materials Based on Artificial Intelligence

RELAPP is an electromechanical device able to measure the elasticity, extensibility, tenacity and strength of flour doughs and other viscoelastic materials and can be easily adapted by artificial intelligence methods for the analysis of other parameters. Its working principle is based on applying a specific deformation on the sample and observing the dynamic response, which allows the physical properties of the material to be computed and measured. To control and visualize the measurement process, a software application was designed that performs the automatic readout of the electronic system. The resulting device, called "RELAPP", is configurable, portable, low cost and easy-to-use. Seven machine learning regression algorithms were applied to predict the target parameters from 1600 tests carried out in the laboratory. Correlation and validation studies of different kinds of flour samples using the newdevice and a standard ChopinAlveograph (R) allowed an accurate determination of the viscoelastic parameters of the analyzed dough with low prediction error (MAE, RMSE). Notably, the software uses an optimized XBoost algorithm to predict the range of values for the tenacity (T), extensibility (EX) and strength (S) of the sample and applies a geometrical method to compute its elasticity using the 3d axis information during the measurement.