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OSE Oven
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    DrDavid
     
    November 2012
    This forum is about specification, design, and fabrication of an oven, one of the components of the GVCS. 

    The GVCS specifies a 'bakery' oven, but a bakery oven is only an oven that has been optimized for baking breads. It may be more useful to design an more generic oven that may be optimized for various types of cooking, including baking. An oven is a contained space that is capable of maintaining a specified temperature higher than the ambient temperature. Ovens are usually insulated, in order to increase energy efficiency. 

    Ovens may be heated by a variety energy sources, although a specific oven is usually optimized to use a particular energy source. Ovens may be directly heated by electricity or gas, or may be indirectly heated by nearly any energy source, including solar, wood, coal, diesel or fuel oil, biomass, and others.

    If the energy source is not suitable for direct contact with food (e.g., fuel oil, diesel, etc.) it may be necessary to heat the oven indirectly. For example, using the energy source to generate steam and using the steam to heat the oven. Ovens using steam or other indirect heating methods are usually more complex and more expensive to construct than directly fired ovens, but offer the advantage of being able to utilize a wider variety of energy sources, and to change energy sources quickly and at low cost.

    To be commercially viable, an oven should be capable of maintaining a selected temperature within a relatively narrow range, be capable of maintaining a wide range of selected temperatures, and maintaining a uniform temperature within the entire oven. Temperature controls may be either electronic or mechanical. There are a number of features that are useful to optimize an oven for various uses. Steam injection and other types of humidity control are desirable for baking ovens. Electronic or mechanical timers and thermometers are important features for most commercial ovens.

    The oven images on the OSE website illustrate a bakery oven with multiple compartments. While multiple compartments are useful if the oven must maintain different temperatures in each compartment, they also add complexity and cost to the design and manufacture of the oven. There is a common type of commercial oven called a 'roll-in' which may be more suitable for the GVCS. Roll-in ovens have open interiors with no shelves or other fixtures, and a low 'deck' height with a small ramp to facilitate rolling a standard rack into the oven.

    The roll-in design allows an entire wheeled rack holding trays of ready-to-cook foods to be rolled into the oven and to be rolled out again after cooking. This separates the food-handling equipment design from the oven design and allows the same oven design to be used for a wide range of food products. The racks are fitted with rails spaced 2" to 8" (50 mm - 200 mm) apart vertically. The rails are designed to hold 'sheet' trays. Standard US sheet trays are 18" x 26" (457 mm x 660 mm) and corresponding racks are typically 28.5" x 18" x 69.8" (724 mm x 457 mm x 1773 mm) high. Each rack holds 8 to 20 trays, depending on the rail spacing.

    While baking sheets could be made any size, it would reduce complexity and manufacturing cost to standardize tray size, based either on the existing US standard or another standard. In use, each tray is loaded with ready-to-cook food, the trays are loaded into the rack allowing sufficient vertical spacing for the particular food, and the loaded rack rolled into the oven. After cooking, the entire rack is rolled out of the oven. This cooking system allows the same ovens, racks, and trays to be used for efficiently cooking foods with a wide range of sizes (e.g. cookies, bread, turkeys, entire lambs) by varying the vertical distance between trays, and leaving unused rails empty.     If a GVCS oven were designed to accommodate US standard racks, the interior dimensions would be approximately 30" deep x 20" wide x 72" high (762 mm x 500 mm x 1829 mm).

    While the discussion above describes a large commercial roll-in oven, the design could be easily adapted to smaller ovens. For example, a half-height oven could use the same basic components, substituting half-height panels and would provide an interior 30" deep x 20" wide x 36" high (762 mm x 500 mm x 915 mm), about 12.5 CFT (0.35 m3). A one-fourth height oven would provide 6.25 CFT (0.18m3), approximately 125% the capacity of a large residential oven. Both the half-height and fourth-height ovens would require appropriately sized racks or other interior fixtures. The half-height version would be suitable for floor mounting, while the fourth-height model may be more suitable for mounting on legs or a table. Table or leg mounting would obviate the ability to roll racks in or out of the oven.

    Is there a reason to include an oven specifically optimized for baking in the GVCS, or would it be more efficient to design a general-purpose commercial oven that could be easily optimized for baking as well as for cooking other foods?
     
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