For commercial bakeries, an oven air velocity recorder 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 cause inconsistent baking.
Reading Thermal, a Reading Bakery brand, 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, the “brain” of our measurement system and a powerful diagnostic tool that has become an industry standard for understanding and improving your proofing, baking, cooling and freezing processes.
What is Oven Air Velocity?
Oven air velocity is the measurement of airflow inside the oven. It is important to measure it because, along with other parameters, air velocity influences the coloration, texture, firmness, and baking time of the final product.
The airflow inside a radiant oven comes from the moving conveyor, the exhaust system, and natural combustion air currents, while the airflow in a convection oven comes primarily from the air distribution plenums. In this case, airflow is particularly critical because it directly controls the amount of heat delivered to the product.
Options for Measuring Oven Air Velocity
You may currently be using a compliance tool that measures and documents temperatures inside the oven to comply with the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Kill Step Validation. However, most such tools only measure temperatures.
Oven air velocity can be measured and recorded with the SCORPION® 2 Air Velocity Sensor. The sensor array delivers 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 sensors varies with the width of the conveyor.
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.
R&D/Corporate Engineers who need to quickly profile an oven to benchmark it for product development, product transfer, and oven matching across the company’s baking platforms, should 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.
When you need an air velocity recorder for a commercial bakery oven, get a precise picture of the interior airflow with the SCORPION® 2 Air Velocity Sensor Array from Reading Thermal. Contact us online, or call our headquarters in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2 to learn more about our oven profiling system.