GéPro (Product engineering)

The Product Engineering team (GéPro) focuses on building the properties of products derived from agriculture, particularly by studying the processes of material transformation and the relationships between composition, structure, and properties in the obtained products. The objective of the research is to develop tools and knowledge that enable the rational construction of products, primarily food items, but also other bioproducts such as cosmetics or bio-based food packaging.

The team specifically works on processes during which thermal and/or mechanical constraints are applied to control the development of functional properties. To elucidate the relationships between processes, composition, and final properties, the structuring processes -as well as the reaction processes (and their interactions) occurring during transformation- are studied at different scales, ranging from the molecular level to the process level.

To identify and validate processes, the team designs:

• specific experimental setups to isolate concomitant phenomena, 
• model products to identify the relationships between structure and properties,
• analytical tools to monitor reactions or characterize structures,
• instrumented prototypes to observe transformation dynamics in situ.

To carry out its missions, the GéPro team has brought together some fifty scientific professionals (experienced researchers or those in training), engineers, and technicians, whose expertise covers various disciplines: chemistry (analytical chemistry, food biochemistry), physico-chemistry and biophysics of food, materials science and process engineering. This enables the team to develop integrative and multidisciplinary approaches to address research questions formulated internally or in collaboration with its academic, institutional, and industrial partners.