New techniques for commercial bread dough mixing

Bread dough mixing is a complex and uncertain process that involves both biological and mechanical polymerization. Although a human expert can control the mixing of dough, it is difficult to model mathematically for use in a conventional control schema. Using the results of the well-known mixograph test for gluten development, expert bakers have observed that the instantaneous mechanical power needed to mix dough has a significant relationship with the dough's gluten development and hydraulic absorption. A logical conclusion based on this observation is to measure the input electrical power for automatic control of large dough mixers. Such a control system must sense the instantaneous, three-phase input power; this signal is very noisy, nonlinear, nonstationary, and time varying. Hence, fuzzy logic is a good tool for developing an automatic control system. Such a system is described.