Résumé
There has been recent interest in developing small-scale smoking technologies that respect French sanitary recommendations concerning benzo(a)pyrene deposition on food. The conceptual and embodiment phases of design, and the sizing of a smoker in which this deposition phenomenon is limited are reviewed in this paper. The conceptual phase of design has lead to a process based on the operations of smoking, heating and drying units, using cooled smoke, radiant plates and supplying flows of this cooled smoke directly to the product. For marketing reasons, the power supply is exclusively derived from the combustion of small logs and the smoke comes from sawdust pyrolysis, this smoke being cooled by flowing through a heat exchanger using ice as a cold source. The embodiment phase of design has lead to a versatile system in terms of smoking, heating and drying functionalities. The sizing of this system is based on knowing the drying kinetic of the product in a traditional smoke house (“boucan”); it was performed by estimating heat and mass transfer phenomena occurring between the product and its surroundings. It leads to a kiln having a thermodynamic efficiency close to 13%.