Oven temperature profile solutions from Reading Thermal are designed to take the guesswork out of oven control and provide bakeries with added safety and quality control measures, focused on the four key oven baking parameters – temperature, air velocity, heat flux and humidity.
Reading Thermal has been researching, measuring, and understanding the commercial baking process for more than 25 years. We manufacture and support the SCORPION® 2 Data Logger which in now a standard in the global baking industry.
Temperature Sensor Array
The Reading Thermal SCORPION® 2 Temperature Sensor Array is designed to measure temperature at product level, in fixed positions across the conveyor, and delivers a true representation of what your product is experiencing over time.
Different types of pluggable sensors are available, including one designed for solid or tight mesh conveyors and one for open mesh conveyors.
The sensor array is connected to the SCORPION® 2 Data Logger and travels through the oven with the product (with the oven under full load), producing an exact picture of temperature from side-to-side and end-to-end.
There are 2 types of pluggable temperature sensors. One is an Air/Conveyor sensor that is designed to measure the surface temperature of the conveyor as well as the air temperature directly above the conveyor. This Sensor is designed for solid or tight mesh conveyors and measures air and band temperatures.
The other pluggable temperature sensor is an Air/Air sensor. It is designed to measure upper air temperature immediately above the conveyor, and lower air temperature of the air rising through the conveyor. It is meant for open mesh conveyors.
Why Measure Oven Temperature?
If you produce bread, artisan bread, biscuits, rolls, hamburger buns, cakes, or other bread products, you know that several stages are temperature-dependent, such as oven-spring, drying/dehydration, and color formation. Too much heat coming from one direction in the oven can cause the bottoms of the loaves to burn before the crusts brown properly.
Our state-of-the-art profiling system also provides an easy way to validate your kill step for food safety and FSMA compliance.
Case Studies:
- A Kaiser-roll bakery was running products through its tunnel oven for 16 minutes. The SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and Temperature Sensor revealed that the products had already reached an internal temperature of 200°F after 10 minutes of baking time. This enabled the bakery to shorten baking time and significantly increase capacity.
- A large bakery needed to determine the proper baking time for a wheat sandwich line it was baking in an 84-ft. continuous impingement tunnel oven featuring eight zones. By using the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System, internal dough temperatures were measured at 200°F at 74% of the 19:30 baking cycle rather than at the target rate of 85%. To slow internal baking, overall oven temperatures were reduced an average of 15°F, resulting in thousands of dollars of savings per month on natural gas.
Don’t ignore the performance of your commercial bakery oven. Consider the SCORPION® 2 Temperature Sensor from Reading Thermal, as well as our other sensors and sensor arrays, to measure baking parameters that affect the quality of your products. Contact us online, or call our headquarters in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2 to explore our innovative products.