Aiming for consistent cooking results, better yield and energy savings with your spiral oven? Meet JBT’s new updated version of Stein TwinDrum™ PRoYIELD™ 600 Spiral Oven, a leap forward in spiral oven design that can boost yield by an estimated up to 7% for chicken wings and pan-fried nuggets, while at the same time helping achieve a 5% reduction in energy use.
Featuring patented double-impact airflow technology, the PRoYIELD Spiral Oven takes the original TwinDrum two-zone cooking design and makes it even better by dramatically improving temperature consistency, allowing customers to improve product quality, boost yield and save energy.
By reducing the internal temperature variation across the TwinDrum’s conveyor belt from as high as 6°C to a little as 1°C, the PRoYIELD ensures consistent cooking across the entirety of products moving through the oven. The pioneering technology not only preserves product moisture and maximizes yield but also mitigate the risk of overcooking and unwanted weight loss.
How it works
Building on the TwinDrum’s balanced airflow system, which ensures superior temperature distribution over the products inside the oven, JBT’s PRoYIELD technology adds Computer Fluid Dynamics and an Air Equalizer to perfect air delivery to products.
The PRoYIELD also works by distributing air both within and outside the drum, ensuring a more even temperature distribution to products. The benefit of this approach is that products can be cooked at lower temperatures, with uniform coloring and significantly less energy required.
Making the PRoYIELD even more accessible to customers, the new design can be easily retrofitted on existing TwinDrum ovens in just a little over a day.
Genesis of an innovation
But how did the development of the PRoYIELD come into being? Teddy Svensson, JBT’s lead engineer on the creation of the new technology, recalls that the evolution of the patented design began when a customer set JBT the task of further enhancing the temperature distribution on their Spiral TwinDrum Oven.
“Getting an even temperature over the width of a conveyor belt is notoriously difficult and it had proven problematic for every machinery manufacturer working in the industry,” says Svensson.
In essence, it meant that to get the products closest to the center drum consistently fully-cooked, those positioned towards the outer-edges faced the problem of being overcooked.
Svensson takes chicken as an example. Cooked chicken typically needs to be heated to 77°C to 78°C to ensure food safety, as products in the conveyor belt’s inner sections reach the necessary temperature range those on the outer edges often experience higher temperatures, ranging from 80°C-85°C, due to the variation of heat distribution. “This means that you are losing moisture and weight, and in the worst case scenario the outer products might even be burnt,” he adds.
Finding the solution
Svensson and his team began brainstorming and looked at how the heated air could be more evenly distributed throughout the oven. He recalls: “With the design that we have on our TwinDrum oven, the air rotates around the inside of the machine and down the spiral. I started to investigate how to better deliver air to the inner side to get a more even heat distribution.”
By making some subtle, but ingenious changes Svensson managed to achieve exactly that outcome. “We developed a new heat-load model and found that the temperature was dramatically improved from the original design where we had 5-6°C variation from the left to the right side, down to 1-2°C,” he says.
The PRoYIELD not only avoids overcooking products, the dramatic reduction in the overall temperature variation means cooking takes place evenly across the whole of the oven, ensuring weight and moisture is retained. The process also allows processors to save energy as there is no need to heat the oven to higher temperatures than necessary.
The new Stein TwinDrum PRoYIELD Spiral Oven can be integrated with other JBT products to form complete in-line processing solutions, including the Formcook Contact cooker, Stein and alco coating & frying equipment as well as Frigoscandia range of chilling and freezing systems.
The Stein TwinDrum PRoYIELD Spiral Oven can be tested at JBT’s Food Technology Centre in Helsingborg in Sweden.
LEARN MORE about the JBT Stein TwinDrum PRoYIELD Spiral Oven
