Energy thermal management in commercial bread-baking using a multi-objective optimisation framework

•A multi-objective optimisation framework to design commercial ovens is presented.•High fidelity CFD embeds experimentally calibrated heat transfer inputs.•The optimum oven design minimises specific energy and bake time.•The Pareto front outlining the surrogate-assisted optimisation framework is built.•Optimisation of industrial bread-baking ovens reveals an energy saving of 637.6 GWh.

In response to increasing energy costs and legislative requirements energy efficient high-speed air impingement jet baking systems are now being developed. In this paper, a multi-objective optimisation framework for oven designs is presented which uses experimentally verified heat transfer correlations and high fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses to identify optimal combinations of design features which maximise desirable characteristics such as temperature uniformity in the oven and overall energy efficiency of baking. A surrogate-assisted multi-objective optimisation framework is proposed and used to explore a range of practical oven designs, providing information on overall temperature uniformity within the oven together with ensuing energy usage and potential savings.