Probing in-mouth texture perception with a biomimetic tongue

An experimental biomimetic tongue-palate system has been developed to probe human in-mouth texture perception. Model tongues are made from soft elastomers patterned with fibrillar structures analogous to human filiform papillae. The palate is represented by a rigid flat plate parallel to the plane of the tongue. To probe the behaviour under physiological flow conditions, deflections of model papillae are measured using a novel fluorescent imaging technique enabling sub-micrometre resolution of the displacements. Using optically transparent Newtonian liquids under steady shear flow, we show that deformations of the papillae allow their viscosity to be determined from 1 Pa s down to the viscosity of water (1 mPa s), in full quantitative agreement with a previously proposed model (Lauga et al. 2016 Front. Phys. 4, 35 (doi:10.3389/fphy.2016.00035)). The technique is further validated for a shear-thinning and optically opaque dairy system.