Experimental and numerical investigations of cake baking in mold

Abstract

This article deals with the in-mold cake baking process. The methodology relies on numerical and experimental investigations to validate a multiphysics developed model. This numerical model is next exploited to enhance the comprehension of the physical processes that occur during a typical cake baking phase. Based on the governing equations for heat and mass transport and under few assumptions (deformable porous medium, local thermodynamic equilibrium, ideal gas mixture …), the problem consists in solving a system of five coupled partial derivative equations. Temperature, moisture content, total gas pressure, porosity and displacement are used as state variables in this study. The swelling of the dough caused by the increase in total gas pressure is predicted by a viscoelastic model. This thermo-hydro-mechanical model is implemented in a finite element code. Moreover, an experimental laboratory set-up was developed to continually acquire temperatures, water losses and gas pressure inside the product. The browning kinetic is also studied. Furthermore, the cake deformation is tracked by camera. The numerical model is validated based on the conducted experiments. Different operating conditions are tested to verify the robustness of the model. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed to understand the impact of estimated parameters on the outputs of the developed model.