It is not only important to classify the staves by their OTR, but also to select them to build a barrel with controlled OTR
Oxygen is an important factor in the wine aging process, and the oxygen
transmission rate (OTR) is the parameter of the wood that reflects its
oxygen permeation. OTR has not been considered in the cooperage industry
yet; however, recent studies proposed a nondestructive method for
estimating the OTR of barrel staves, but an efficient method to combine
these staves to build barrels with a desired OTR is needed to implement
it in the industry. This article proposes artificial intelligence
methods for selecting staves for the construction of barrel heads or
bodies with a desired target OTR. Genetic algorithms were used to
implement these methods in consideration of the known OTR of the staves
and the geometry of the wine barrels. The proposed methods were
evaluated in several scenarios: homogenizing the OTR of the actual
constructed barrels, constructing low-OTR and high-OTR barrels based on a
preclassification of the staves and implementing the proposed method in
real cooperage conditions. The results of these experiments suggest the
suitability of the proposed methods for their implementation in a
cooperage in order to build controlled OTR barrels.
This paper published in Molecules belongs to the:
Special Issue "Alcoholic Beverages Aging Technologies"
