Background information
Foreign body contamination of foods can be a safety or quality issue, or both. Regardless, if a food is contaminated by a foreign body, the repercussions for the food business can be expensive and damaging.
To help reduce this risk Vikan invented UST brushware. This blog post takes you through how, as part of the development and validation of its innovative UST technology, Vikan investigated the bristle strength fixation in different food industry brushware. It also takes you through how the results generated have been used, and explains how UST technology helps minimise bristle loss.
Our investigations
Determination of the force required to pull a bristle from different types of food industry brushware.
Vikan investigated the amount of force (measured in Newtons, N) required to pull a bristle from the following types of food industry brushware;
- a standard drilled and stapled brush
- a resin set, drilled and stapled brush, and
- an Ultra Safe Technology (UST) brush
For the standard drilled and stapled, and resin set, drilled and stapled brushware the force required to pull a bristle from the bundle was affected by a number of different things including,
- the thickness of the bristle
- its position within the bristle bundle, and
- whether it was the first or subsequent bristle to be pulled from a bundle.
The results indicated that the force required to pull a bristle from a standard drilled and stapled brush, or a resin set, drilled and stapled brush is highly variable, because of the factors given above (individually or in combination). For example, the first bristle that is pulled from a drilled and stapled brush bundle will be tightly fixed by the metal staple that holds the bristles in place. Consequently, the amount of force required to pull this first bristle from the bundle is high. However, once one bristle is pulled from a bundle, a gap is created that causes the remaining bristles in that bundle to be looser. The more bristles that are pulled out of the bundle, the looser the remaining bristles get, and the less force is required to pull them out , thus increasing the likelihood of bristle loss.