Freezing of water-rich materials inevitably leads to changes in volume and thermal stresses. Determining and modeling the thermal stresses require the mechanical properties of the food material to be properly measured or predicted during freezing. This paper investigated mechanical properties such as the Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio in chicken nugget crust and crumb samples at the different freezing temperatures (?20, ?30, and ?40°C). Mechanical properties were measured by compression tests at seven nugget-center temperatures and a continuous video capturing method during the freezing process. Results showed that ice formation led to a sharp increase in the Young’s modulus of samples, however, a gradual decrease in Poisson’s ratio values was observed as the nuggets’ center temperature approached the freezing point. Therefore, the greatest changes were observed at the freezing point. Kinetic and fitting equations were used to model the Young’s modulus, and the Arrhenius equation was used to describe the temperature dependence. The predicted values by the models were found in close agreement with the experimental results.
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