There are two types of people: those who eat to live and those who live to eat. David Parrino lives to eat. David travels to eat as well. He once paid upwards of $350 for a visa to get into Bolivia just to eat at a restaurant. Alas, he is stuck in quarantine living to eat at home. David and his wife, Ami, have been cooking elaborate meals to maintain sanity. Ami has been coming up with “theme nights” like German, Polish, Swedish, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, New York Steak-House, Fancy Date Night, Takeout-Tuesday (#takeouttuesday), American, Tiki, Belgian, Hungarian, Polish, Kosher, British, Beer Festival, Cuban, etc. Ami is an Advanced Cicerone®, so she paired dishes with appropriate beer styles or cocktails.
Ami has been documenting each theme night on social media for friends and family.
The two have been creating an awful lot of leftovers to heat and Ami doesn’t like meat that was re-heated in the microwave. Enter the toaster oven. One of David’s favorite wedding registry gifts was their Panasonic FlashXpress infrared toaster oven (big shout out to Debra and Richard Radke).
This oven is unique in that it uses infrared light to heat food quickly and evenly. When the oven’s heating lamps turn on, the heat ramps up quickly, when they turn off, the heat quickly dissipates, unlike traditional ovens which heat up an element which radiates heat. Air fryers have been all the rage lately and David was close to pulling the trigger on buying one but he did some research and learned that air fryers are just toaster ovens with convection. David finds the infrared toaster oven’s mode of operation intriguing, so he set up a BLACK-Comet-CXR-SR with a F600-Vis-NIR fiber and CR2 cosine receptor to take some readings. Unfortunately, the system is not calibrated for irradiance (W/m^2), but he saved the SCOPE mode data and if we were to calibrate this exact system at a later date, we could theoretically do some post processing math with the calibration file to get the absolute intensity measurements.
Inside the oven, there is a halogen lamp for lighting and two tube lamps for heating, one above and one below. The oven flashes on and off to regulate temperature and the light bounces around the reflective interior of the oven to give even cooking.
The oven has a feature allowing just the halogen lamp to turn on, so David took a measurement of just the halogen lamp without the heating tubes. The halogen alone gets pretty hot!
He turned on the oven and measured both the halogen lamp and the heating lamp combined. He tried placing the cosine receptor directly on a heating lamp and noticed that the lamp intensity would gradually rise as it was on and quickly cool when the lamp was turned off.
Unfortunately, a lot of the excitement is happening at the tail end of the BLACK-Comet’s Silicon CCD’s sensitivity curve. What David needs is an InGaAs detector. David is wary of stepping foot on StellarNet property because the production engineers are taking many precautions to keep everyone safe. He feels that adding unnecessary personnel to the mix would defeat the purpose of running two shifts of production engineers on opposite schedules. When David gets a chance, he will stop by and pick up a “care package” with a DWARF-Star spectrometer which has an InGaAs detector which can measure the 900-1700nm range of the heating tubes and halogen lamp. Stay tuned!
Home Quarantine Article by David Parrino
StellarNet Senior Technical Sales & Support
& OEM Business Director
