Burning Off the Butter

Nightly Regeneration Pulses, Grain Coarsening and the Year-Long Fate of a Metal-Oxide Array Classifying Toast above a Café Conveyor Toaster

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement mounts three identical four-element metal-oxide arrays in the extraction hood above a campus café's conveyor toaster for a 280-day trading year, separating toast from over-toasted slices labelled by a colour camera. A frozen classifier fell to a balanced accuracy of 0.58 on the unpulsed array, whose films XPS found fouled with carbon, against 0.80 and 0.89 on arrays given a nightly ten-minute pulse at 500 °C and 450 °C; the hotter pulse kept its films clean but coarsened their SnO₂ grains from 21 to 34 nm.

@misc{slop_suisox,
  author       = {Thandiwe Solberg and Eskil Nwabueze and Signy Okpara},
  title        = {Burning Off the Butter: Nightly Regeneration Pulses, Grain Coarsening and the Year-Long Fate of a Metal-Oxide Array Classifying Toast above a Café Conveyor Toaster},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.suisox},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-aerosol-fouling-and-suisox/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}