The Time Dependent Effects of Humidity on Tortilla Chips

Overview

Objectives/Goals My experiment was designed to demonstrate the time-dependent effects of humidity on tortilla chips. My hypothesis was that humidity is a leading cause of decreasing crispness or increasing staleness of chips. Methods/Materials To test this theory, I created a dry environment using desiccant in a sealable plastic container, a humid environment using evaporating water in another container, and an uncontrolled #household# environment. Temperature and other conditions were the same for the three containers. I sealed test chips in the dry and humid containers and placed chips in the open #household# container. I used humidity loggers in each of these environments. I defined crispness as the number of pieces a chip breaks into when hit by a fixed impact. Fresher, crispier chips break into more fragments. Using chips exposed to these three environments, I measured the crispness of chips over time by dropping an empty plastic bottle down a PVC pipe onto test chips, and I would count the number of fragments above a certain size. I plotted average counts versus time for each of my environments. Results The dry environment preserved the crispness of chips. The humid and household environment turned the chips stale, as measured by statistically significant declines in the number of broken chip fragments over time. The humid environment turned the chips stale at a faster rate than the household environment. In a preliminary test, I demonstrated that temperature was likely less of a factor by testing dry chips placed in a freezer. There was no statistically measurable change in crispness compared to room temperature dry chips. Conclusions/Discussion My hypothesis was demonstrated because the dry chips retained their crispness, while high humidity rapidly made chips less crispy.

Awards (1)

• Third Place

Competition history

• CSEF 2015 Product Science (Physical) (Junior Division Only) · Entry J2015

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Physical Sciences projects
• CSEF Physical Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2015 project
• CSEF Third Place winners