IEEE Spectrum July, 2014 - 56

The brightest minds discussing the biggest topics.
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New Webinars in July
8 July Essential Principles of Jitter Part 2:
The Components of Jitter

In this webinar we introduce a simplified version
of Gaussian statistics to describe the figures of
merit for random jitter. http://spectrum.ieee.org/
webinar/essential-principles-of-jitter-part-2the-components-of-jitter

10 July Accelerate Your Product Development:
Applying Strategic Reuse to LightlyRegulated Electronics Companies

This webinar will discuss the different elements
of semiconductor design that could benefit from
increased reuse and showcase an effective way
on managing variants of design. http://spectrum.
ieee.org/webinar/accelerate-your-productdevelopment-applying-strategic-reuse-tolightlyregulated-electronics-companies

On-Demand Webinars
Click and Drag Your Embedded
Industrial Controller's Human Machine
Interface Into the 21st Century

This Webinar will cover everything you need to design a
modern HMI into your system quickly and cost effectively.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/webinar/click-and-dragyour-embedded-industrial-controllers-humanmachine-interface-into-the-21st-century

Model-based Battery Management System (BMS)
for Electric and Hybrid Electric Drive System
This presentation will demonstrate the development of
predictive models of battery cells that can be implemented
within a multi-domain system model of a hybrid system.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/webinar/modelbasedbattery-management-system-bms-for-electricand-hybrid-electric-drive-system
Sponsors

is simple. Please give us ovens that let us select separate wetand dry-bulb temperatures! And while you're at it, perhaps
you could solve a related problem: the inadequate precision
of the humidity- and temperature-control systems. Both temperature and humidity levels stray from the set points more
than they should.
Precisely controlling the temperature and humidity of an oven
means you can better control the actual temperature of the food
inside it. And that's what really matters. A chicken breast cooked
to 60 °C is moist and delicious; cooked to 65 °C, it's dry. An ovenbaked omelet can be exquisite. But in today's ovens it is nearly
impossible to cook one properly, because a difference of even a
few degrees from the perfect conditions-82 °C and 100 percent
humidity-will produce either a runny omelet or one that's dry
and brittle.
Some other interesting technologies that make ovens more
useful are already on the market. Newer models of steam ovens
by Wolf Appliance have a "slow roast" mode that allows the cook
to enter a serving time. Ovens made by Rational measure the
core temperature of the food using a probe. The probe has five
separate sensors; the machine's digital control chooses the one
placed deepest into the food. That way, you don't need to hit the
food dead center with the tip of the probe. The oven adjusts the
temperature of the oven cavity automatically to control the rate
at which the core temperature of the food rises.
These developments are encouraging but isolated. an oven could
be manufactured today that could incorporate many of the
technologies now available and go a long way toward turning
today's mere brick dryer into a true food cooker. It would have
wet- and dry-bulb temperature controls, better thermostats,
probes to go inside food, and sensors that detect hot and cold
spots. All these features would add just a few hundred dollars
to the cost of the parts.
And adding just a little more intelligence to the oven could
take us even further. A smarter oven would use both advanced
sensing and mathematical modeling to observe and project the
temperature trajectory within the food. It could then adjust its
heating mode and intensity to create the optimal conditions for
cooking that type of food or simply to have good, if not perfect,
food ready at a selected time.
But why stop there? With ideal technology, you could put different parts of your meal in a single oven and it could figure out how
to cook them so that they were all done at the same time in the way
you want them. To do that, we need a way to focus just the right
amount of energy on each part of the food and to measure how
it responds to the energy. This would likely require ovens made
out of new materials-not just sheet metal-that could be monitored and controlled in finely grained detail: Imagine an LCD in
which each pixel gives off not colored light but powerful infrared
energy. When you put a slice of toast on top, you could control
how much heat is delivered to each spot on the toast-resulting in
evenly toasted bread, or, perhaps, toast with a shaded image on
its surface. That would be the ultimate cooking technology. n
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum July, 2014