CU LTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY Smart blast freezer receives higher hygiene ranking An 18 centimetre-thick layer of pre-fried chips moves into the world’s longest blast freezer at Farm Frites in Oudenhoorn. An ice-cold wind that takes your breath away freezes over 30 tonnes of chips towards a temperature of -14° Celsius. With smart technical solutions, the AFE Europe supplier from Halsteren ensures that the capacity remains high, the use of electricity decreases and that cleaning is easy, fast and hygienic. D ue to the worldwide growing demand for deep-frozen chips, European processing industries are rapidly investing in their deep-freeze capacity. Maarten van Bodegom and Marcel van der Hagen, both employed by AFE Europe BV, see that the demand is also increased by strict legislation around the use of the refrigerant Freon. They see that customers ask for increasingly stringent standards regarding matters such as continuity, capacity, hygiene and natural energy use. ‘This was also the case at Farm Frites. Last year, the processor invested millions of euros in a new blast freezer. This is a fantastic example of such a state-of-the-art line’, European Sales Manager Van Bodegom tells us in no uncertain terms. Continuity is an important condition ‘Continuity is one of the most important conditions for a modern blast freezer’, Sales Manager Van der Hagen explains. ‘The real profit is in the availability of the machine. Every second that the production line at Farm Frites is not operating costs 1.5 euros. When an eight-hour shift falls out, it costs the company 43,500 euros. With the new blast freezer, we can limit the standstill to the necessary cleaning between the lots’, Van der Hagen explains. At one of the thirteen evaporators, he shows us that all around AFE has mounted rotating metal slats. ‘Due to moisture release during the freezing process, ice formation takes place in the evaporators. Because of this ice formation, the capacity of the evaporators diminishes. The slats ensure that we can defrost the evaporators during the freezing process instead of having to stop the entire line to defrost them. Via an automatic process, the slates close on both sides of an evaporator. We then push hot gas through the system, and within 20 minutes the ice is gone. Here we have chosen to remove the meltwater via a thick pipe. This means that pieces of ice can fall without clogging the drain. This ensures that the capacity of the evaporator remains 100 percent’, the Sales Managers enthusiastically explains. Electricity saving ‘Farm Frites saves a lot of electricity with its modern evaporators’, Van Bodegom adds. He explains that the discharged air from the evaporator is -20° Celsius. ‘Many suppliers produce this air with a cooling agent of -32° Celcius. With our evaporators, we can already achieve this temperature at -25° Celcius. We know that every degree lower in the evaporator requires 3 percent more electricity, which means that we can save 21 percent on electricity here. At an electricity price of 6 eurocents per KWh, Farm Frites saves around 160,000 euros in costs a year’, Van Bodegom calculates. ‘Furthermore, in the 60 metres long, 8 metres wide and 5.5 metres high blast freezer, we have Potato World 2017 • number 2 47 Pagina 46

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