Stove-top Infra-red Surface Temperature Monitoring Concept

Michael Stone, December 30, 2017, , (src), (all posts)

Contents

The Problem

Cooking processes work by controlling temperature over time, among many other chemical and material processes.

However, contemporary stovetops / ranges provide little direct visual feedback on surface temperature to users and do not themselves control the supply of heat in order to produce good outputs or to enforce safety constraints.

As a result, users use many workarounds to sense the temperature of object surfaces on their range to ensure that their meals are fully cooked and to enforce fire and air-quality safety constraints.

A Solution Concept

Build and position an IR camera and display system to continuously display the estimated surface temperature of the objects on top of the range.

Materials

FLIR, Fluke, and Seek all make fairly cheap (<<$1k) IR cameras, I think based on microbolometers, which sense relevant temperature ranges in adequately high resolution.

Proposed Method

By combining one or more of these microbolometers with a display screen, we may be able to give range users direct visual feedback on range-top object surface temperatures.