Bread baking modeling: Coupling heat transfer and weight loss by the introduction of an explicit vaporization term

A model for the description of bread baking that includes heat transfer, water transport and vaporization has been developed and applied to a test case. The bread physical properties are defined considering it as made of macro-components (water, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, fibers), based both on the initial formulation and on the dynamic evolution of the system (in terms of temperature and composition). Baking experiments have been conducted in a commercial oven for the model validation with temperature dynamics and weight loss data. Water vaporization is introduced in the conservation equations by an explicit term that directly couples heat and mass balances.