Don’t ignore the performance of your commercial bakery oven. Reading Thermal can help you understand why temperature uniformity is critical in industrial ovens and how temperature profiling can improve the proofing, baking, cooling, and freezing processes that affect your products.
Reading Thermal, a product brand of Reading Bakery Systems, is located in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania. Our heat transfer experts have been researched and measured the commercial baking process for 25+ years. We manufacture and support the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and Data Logger which has become a standard in the baking industry.
Connecting our innovative smart sensors and sensor arrays to the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and Data Logger and passing them through the oven with your product enables the system to capture the four main baking parameters:
- Temperature (including the temperature of both the air and the oven belt surface)
- Heat flux (energy transfer)
- Humidity
- Airflow (velocity).
The Importance of Oven Temperature Profiling
Product level temperature throughout an oven can make the difference between optimum quality and throughput – and wasteful, under-baked, or burnt product. The process of fermentation, product swelling, moisture evaporation, flavor development, and surface coloring are all time and temperature dependent. For example:
- Too little heat during baking can cause crusts to be brittle or dry,
- Too little heat during baking can create products that are too light in color.
- Too little heat during baking can create a structure that is too dense.
- Too much heat can cause the bottoms of the loaves to burn before the crusts brown correctly.
- Too much heat will cause moisture to evaporate too rapidly, and the dough to rise unevenly.
How to Measure Oven Temperature
Reading Thermal’s 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:
- Type A: This Air/Conveyor sensor is designed to measure air temperature immediately above the conveyor, and the surface temperature of the conveyor itself. It is designed for solid or tight mesh conveyors. One thermocouple in each pair measures air temperature while the other is spring-loaded down onto the conveyor surface.
- Type B: This Air/Air sensor measures upper air temperature immediately above the conveyor, and the temperature of the lower air that is rising through the conveyor. It was created for open mesh conveyors. The upper and lower thermocouples are separated by a thin shield.
The sensor array is connected to the SCORPION® 2 Data Logger and travels through the oven with your product(s), yielding a precise picture of temperature from side-to-side and end-to-end.
Learn why temperature uniformity in industrial ovens is critical and how it has a significant impact on the quality and consistency of your products. The SCORPION® 2 Profiling System from Reading Thermal will help you bake your products to perfection. Contact us online, or call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2 for more details about our innovative products.