When you need air flow monitoring for your industrial bakery oven, consider the innovative SCORPION® 2 Air Velocity Sensor from Reading Thermal.
Reading Thermal, headquartered in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, has been focused on measuring and understanding the commercial baking process for more than 25 years. We manufacture and support the SCORPION® 2 Data Logger which has become a standard in the baking industry and provides an easy way to validate your kill step for food safety.
By connecting our different smart sensors and sensor arrays to the SCORPION® 2 Data Logger and passing them through the oven with the product, the measurement system can capture the four main baking parameters: temperature of the environment (including the temperature of both the air and the oven belt surface), heat flux (energy transfer), humidity and air flow (velocity).
Why Air Flow Matters?
The cooking performance of your commercial oven depends on the airflow within the oven. Measuring the air flow or air velocity is important because, along with other parameters like temperature and humidity, the air velocity influences the coloration, texture, firmness, and baking time of the final product.
In a radiant oven, the airflow comes from the moving conveyor, the exhaust system, and natural combustion air currents. In a convection oven, the airflow comes primarily from the air distribution plenums. In this case, airflow is crucial because it directly controls the amount of heat delivered to the product.
Oven air flow can be measured and recorded with the SCORPION® 2 Air Velocity Sensor. The sensor array provides you with a precise picture of airflow patterns inside the oven from side to side and end to end. The sensors collect data, at product level, as the array travels through the oven. The number of required sensors will vary with the width of the conveyor.
Air Velocity Profiles will help you spot airflow differences between baking zones, concentrated air velocities on isolated parts of the conveyor, and unwanted air currents at the entrance or exit of the oven that result in inconsistent baking.
Another innovative option is the SCORPION® 2 Temp+Airflow Sensor Array, which is designed to simultaneously profile temperature and airflow across the width of large tray and grid conveyor ovens exceeding 2m (6.5′). The sensor array contains nine Temp+Airflow sensors spaced evenly across the length of an aluminum bar. The sensor array comes in three sizes to match the most popular bread oven conveyor widths.
If you are an R&D/Corporate Engineer who needs to quickly profile an oven to benchmark it for product development, product transfer and oven matching across the company’s baking platforms, consider the SCORPION® 2 R&D Smart Sensor. Instead of requiring several passes through the oven with individual sensors, this multi-element sensor enables you to profile environment temperature, product core temperature, airflow, and energy transfer in a single pass-through process.
The air flow in your commercial bakery oven can have a major impact on the quality and consistency of your products. Air flow monitoring with smart sensors and sensor arrays from Reading Thermal can help you bake to perfection. Contact us online, or call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2 to learn more about our innovative products.