Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Two Different Traditional Hand-Baking Flatbread Bakery Units in Kashan, Iran

In present study, experimental measurements and mathematical modeling were employed to investigate the different parameters, such as temperature of different parts of oven, natural gas consumption, flue gases temperature and portion of different heat transfer mechanisms during baking, in two different traditional flatbread bakeries called Sangak (/sӑngӑk/) and Barbari (/bӑrbӑri/). In all studied ovens, the bread receives the energy from natural and forced convections, conduction, and radiation (volumetric and surface radiation). The main aim of this study is introduction of a numerical simulation in order to investigate and validate the flatbread bakery ovens. This validation has resulted in to analyze different bakery ovens using numerical methods and consequently reduce the experiments costs. Due to fulfill this demand two numerical models are used and solved using control volume method based on SIMPLE algorithm and RNG k-ε method. The obtained results showed that numerical solution can make a reliable result in case of modeling bakery ovens, because of a good agreement between numerical and experimental results with the maximum error of 12.57%.