Questions begging for answers (Part I) – Water degumming

When reviewing manuscripts or reading published articles, I often wonder why their authors chose to study the subject of their papers. Often, their results will not be used and may hardly contribute to science or technology. This is all the more surprising, since work done in the past hardly ever provides final answers, and therefore leaves questions unanswered, questions that could perhaps not be studied with the tools available at the time but that could be tackled nowadays. In the present series of articles I will discuss a number of subjects that in my opinion warrant research and I will suggest how this research can be approached. The water degumming process has been in industrial use for almost a century. Some insight was gained during the last century, but research was abandoned when it reached the limits of the analytical capabilities of the time. Consequently, there are many open questions concerning the composition of compounds containing phosphorus, how much of the acid value should be attributed to FFA, how the triglyceride content of the gums can be controlled and how the industrial process can be optimised with respect to the predictability of process performance, product quality and cost.