A Sensing System for Continuous Monitoring of Bread Dough During Fermentation

摘要

Assessment of fermentation as the heart of the bread making process is of significantimportance. For this mean a variety of methods and devices have already beeninvented but have always faced drawbacks such as limitation in predicting and monitoringthe fermentation in situ, due to fluctuating fermentation conditions. The aimof this study is manufacturing of a system for continuous, accurate and simultaneousmonitoring of pressure and temperature of bread dough in real fermentation conditionby means of in-contact measurement of dough pressure during fermentation.In this research a new method in terms of dough pressure and temperature measurementduring fermentation was designed in which the instrument was given thename of “fermetron”; then its precision and correctness on different flours were validatedaccording to reliable rheological tests using alveograph and rheofermentometer.Given the close trends among parameters of rheofermentometer and alveographwith those of fermetron, its validation in regard to monitoring dough fermentationwas confirmed. The tests results, while confirming the accuracy and precision of thefermetron performance, show the significant effect of the flour sample quality on theprocess of fermentation. Fermetron exhibits the pressure evaluation results graphically.Each graph includes five main parts which is correspondent to dough state interms of gas production initiation, gas production rate, gas retention, gas release,yeast activity end, and multistage gas release, respectively.