Numerical thermal analysis of an electric oven for Neapolitan pizzas

Abstract

Neapolitan pizza is traditionally cooked in wood-fired ovens ensuring high quality in cooking pizza and providing an excellence in Italian cooking tradition. Besides safeguarding Italian cooking tradition, in recent years there is a growing attention on wood-fired oven impacts both on indoor and outdoor air quality and pollution. Thus, optimal design of electric ovens alternative to wood-fired ones is an interesting concern in order to achieve both high quality of Neapolitan pizza cooking and air pollution prevention. This paper deals with a numerical investigation on thermal conditions provided by an innovative electric oven for Neapolitan pizzas cooking. A three-dimensional numerical model has been developed based on a finite volume scheme to simulate steady and unsteady operating conditions. Radiation effects of inner walls have been considered and the boundary effects of the oven, both radiative and convective, have been carefully modelled. Results have been examined in terms of heat flux distributions, temperature and velocity fields, showing good cooking conditions for pizzas.

Semiempirical modeling of a traditional wood‐fired pizza oven in quasi‐steady‐state operating conditions

“…Nevertheless, it has been very poorly studied so far (Igo et al, 2020;Manhiça, 2014;Manhiça et al, 2012). In contrast, the radiative and convective heat transfer mechanisms in electric pizza ovens were used to describe their performance in steady and unsteady operating conditions by means of three-dimensional numerical models (Ciarmiello & Morrone, 2016a, 2016b.…”

Performance characterization of a traditional wood‐fired pizza oven

“…Practically, no information about the thermal performance of wood‐fired pizza ovens is currently available, and this is a strong limitation in modeling mass and heat transfer mechanisms during pizza baking. In contrast, the performance of alternative electric pizza ovens in steady and unsteady operating conditions was analyzed by resorting first to a three‐dimensional numerical model (Ciarmiello & Morrone, 2016a ) and second to a three‐dimensional computational fluid dynamics model to simulate radiative and convective heat transfer mechanisms (Ciarmiello & Morrone, 2016b ). During pizza cooking, the decrease in the oven floor temperatures was primarily affected by wall emissivity, while the increase in pizza temperature was sensitive to pizza and wall emissivity in the ranges of 0.6–1.0 and 0.7–1.0, respectively (Ciarmiello & Morrone, 2016b ).…”