An Analysis of Air Flow in the Baking Chamber of a Tunnel-Type Electric Oven
Gabriel-Alexandru Constantin,
Mariana-Gabriela Munteanu,
Gheorghe Voicu,
Gigel Paraschiv,
Elena-Madalina Ștefan
Affiliations
Gabriel-Alexandru Constantin
Biotechnical Systems Department, Faculty of Biotechnical Systems Engineering, National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest, Splaiul Independentei Street, No. 313, District 6, RO-060042 Bucharest, Romania
Mariana-Gabriela Munteanu
Biotechnical Systems Department, Faculty of Biotechnical Systems Engineering, National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest, Splaiul Independentei Street, No. 313, District 6, RO-060042 Bucharest, Romania
Gheorghe Voicu
Biotechnical Systems Department, Faculty of Biotechnical Systems Engineering, National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest, Splaiul Independentei Street, No. 313, District 6, RO-060042 Bucharest, Romania
Gigel Paraschiv
Biotechnical Systems Department, Faculty of Biotechnical Systems Engineering, National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest, Splaiul Independentei Street, No. 313, District 6, RO-060042 Bucharest, Romania
Elena-Madalina Ștefan
Biotechnical Systems Department, Faculty of Biotechnical Systems Engineering, National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest, Splaiul Independentei Street, No. 313, District 6, RO-060042 Bucharest, Romania
The baking process in tunnel ovens can be influenced by many parameters. Among these, the most important can be considered as: the baking time, the volume of dough pieces, the texture and humidity of the dough, the distribution of temperature inside the oven, as well as the flow of air currents applied in the baking chamber. In order to obtain a constant quality of bakery or pastry products, and for the efficient operation of the oven, it is necessary that the solution made by the designers be subjected to modelling, simulation and analysis processes, before their manufacture, and in this sense it can be applied to the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) numerical simulation tool. In this study, we made an analysis of the air flow inside the baking chamber of an oven. The analyzed oven was used very frequently on the pastry lines. After performing the modelling and simulation, the temperature distribution inside the oven was obtained in the longitudinal and transverse planes. For the experimental validation of the temperatures obtained in the computer-assisted simulation, the temperatures inside the analyzed electric oven were measured. The measured temperatures validated the simulation results with a maximum error of 7.6%.
