An approach to reduce the pre-heating time in a convection oven via CFD simulation

Convective ovens require a pre-heating stage to achieve a homogenous temperature. Energy consumption is high during the pre-heating stage and proportional to pre-heating time. The pre-heating time depends on the set-point temperature. In this work a pilot scale convective oven was represented as a nominal scenario, and provided experimental data for temperature. The strategy consisted of 3-D computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations at different temperatures and geometrical variants of the internal baffle plate. The simulations were carried out using the ANSYS CFX package and were contrasted with experimental measurements. Results proved that the baffle plate geometry exerted an important hydrodynamic influence in the reduction of the pre-heating time.