INTRODUCTION
Roasting and baking are universal
cooking methods consisting in heating the food inside an oven at a uniform
temperature. In these processes, heat is transferred to the load mainly by
means of radiation and convection. Although these are widely-known phenomena,
complex and combined thermal, chemical and mass transfer processes occur within
the product and change its properties during the cooking.
By considering their energy source,
ovens can be broadly classified into two groups; fuel–based and electric ovens.
Electric resistance heating has
various advantages over systems based on fuel combustion, such as increased
control accuracy and heating rate. Thus, electrical heating constitutes a
suitable choice for developing laboratory instruments, especially those
demanding small heating volumes and precise temperature control.
Researchers have analysed diverse types of
ovens; Mirade et al (2011) predicted the air temperature in an industrial
biscuit baking oven while Ploteau et al (2011), and Khatir et al (2012) worked
on bread baking. Some research works achieved valuable outcomes for transient
responses but the high computational necessities of the numerical approaches
make them unrealistic for processes involving a high number of
simulations.
Some earlier works were focused on
developing simple thermal models for ovens, primarily to use them in the design
of temperature regulators where elementary principles were applied to build
models that describe the temperature dynamics of an oven cavern. While these models
showed their helpfulness, they did not consider the complete thermal behavior
of the system because they were wholly interested in the cavern temperature.
Other research groups oriented their
studies to the cooking load itself, obtaining precise models for specific
combinations of cooking load and heating method. Abraham & Sparrow (2010),
predicted a model of heat transferred to a metallic load while the models
presented included both thermal diffusivity and mass transfer phenomenon in
cake baking or meat roasting processes.
A baking oven is the most widely used
appliance in food service industry. An oven can be simply described as a fully
enclosed thermally insulated chamber use for the heating, baking or drying of a
substance.
In a baking oven, the hot air flows
over the baking material either by natural convection or forced by a fan, the
convection heat transfer from the air, and the radiation heat transfer from the
oven heat the surfaces and the conduction heat transfer across contact area between
product and metal surface. The moisture in the food material simultaneously
diffuses toward the surfaces where it is transfers from the surface by
convection. The product loses moisture with continuous movement of the oven
ambient air.
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