Leader companies are exploring innovations to improve the dynamism of the refrigeration process, focusing on the effectiveness of deep freezing. This approach offers significant advantages in maintaining foods’ organoleptic and nutritional properties thanks to the fast achievement of necessary temperatures.
Deep freezing has been acknowledged in the food world for its capability of improving both the process and the product versus the conventional freezing. The speed in reaching the wished temperature contributes in conserving animal and vegetal cellules without damaging them with ice microcrystals, as it happens in the gradual cooling. This grants the product’s specific quality, reduces the weight loss and needs lower energy consumptions than older methods.
In the past, refrigeration used delicate refrigerant gases like ammonia, but the complex management and the concerns about toxicity have urged towards new solutions. Cryogenics emerges as an interesting prospect, exploiting elements at the liquid state for an efficient thermal exchange. This new frontier offers economic advantages and practicability in comparison with previous solutions.
Nitrogen and other gases, the ultra BT within reach
It is not a secret that there are alternative plant engineering solutions that focus on flexibility and efficiency compared to traditional systems based on compression. These new systems offer notable technical advantages, working in a radically different way. The applicative flexibility is a key feature, allowing the adjustment of the processing capacity according to the wished cooling speed and to the cold quantity demanded. This allows managing productions dynamically, adapting the plant to the demanded quantities instead of binding it to the maximum consumption.
The high cooling speed of cryogenic fluids contributes in shortening the overall processing time of products, optimizing the use of appliances and maintaining a constant yield. The lower plant engineering complexity results in operational benefits in manufacturing lines, with minor structural overall dimensions, user-friendly maintenance management and more flexibility for organizational improvements in production.
“Modern” application fields
In addition to the food ambit, an application it is worth underlining is precisely the use of cryogenics in the cosmetic and pharmaceutical sectors, like in the case of vaccines, typical example of a situation where the achievement and the maintenance of the expected conservation temperature is a key variable of the product quality.
Moreover, industry needs to optimize the shelf life due to both economic reasons and to environmental ones, connected with the waste reduction, and therefore cryogenics is suitable for maintenance processes of the ideal temperature conditions with lower costs and engagements.
Let us not forget that we are speaking of Ultra BT, of a field attended by both technicians and by designers with an excellent professional and competence level, then the adoption of these systems is less and less hindered by “cultural” resistances, even if the course for its accomplished development must be still implemented, especially in virtue of some additional difficulties that instead still remain in the world of buyers, who are not always ready to reap the overall potentiality of a different methodology from the “conventional” refrigeration.
