STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — Gavin O’Reilly, currently president of Perten Instruments, Springfield, Illinois, U.S,, has been named president for the entire Perten Group, succeeding Sven Holmlund, group chief executive officer. The announcement was made at Perten users’ group session during the AACC International meeting Oct. 18-21.

O’Reilly will relocate to Stockholm, Sweden.

In other developments, Charlie Kauffman, Perten’s rheology product manager for North America, introduced a new version of the company’s Perten RVA (Rapid Visco Analyser) instrument.

“This can replace time-consuming bake tests for measuring the quality of bakery mixes,” Kauffman said.

“This is the only instrument that evaluates ingredient performance in this way,” he said, “and it amounts to a better mousetrap for the baking industry.”

By measuring cooking and hydration performance, it can quickly identify abnormalities in bake mixes.

“We knew the RVA detected irregularities in component ratios,” Kauffman said. “When you consider the time to mix, bake and then clean-up from the traditional bake test, the RVA is much faster and more cost-effective.”

Perten sponsored a scientific study at the Northern Crops Institute in Fargo, North Dakota, U.S., comparing RVA results from altered bake mixes to test bake results from the same mixes. A new, application-specific RVA model, the RVA-MP (for “mix performance”) will be released to the baking and flour industry in early 2016.

Rob Packer, from Perten’s parent company, PerkinElmer, described a new differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) that uses a double-furnace design. The double furnace allows direct measurement of energy of thermal transition (i.e. gelatinization temperatures) - unlike other instruments that must measure a temperature difference between a sample and reference and then equate to the energy of a thermal transition. The PerkinElmer DSC instrument uses a highly efficient, low mass, platinum furnace that heats quickly to a maximum of 750°C/min.

“The fast heating means not only faster results, but greater sensitivity and the ability to resolve overlap transitions often masked in slower ramping instruments” Packer explained.