Applying cold in beverage production

Lately it is impossible to imagine the food industry without conditioning units, cooling and freezing semi-products and final products. The samples of refrigerating equipment include: conditioning workrooms, cooling milk, beer, wine and other alcohol and non-alcoholic drinks, paste, poultry, ham, sausage after thermal processing, etc.

There are a lot of kinds and modifications of water cooling systems depending on their intended purpose and refrigeration capacity, the place of installation and operation mode, cooling scheme. The kind of refrigerated liquors is highly important: whether it is food or industrial liquor, what end temperature is required, what temperature difference before and after cooling is.

A cooling scheme with an assembly circulation tank has become highly popular in fluctuating loads. Particularly, when there are a few cold consumers connected to one refrigerating unit. For example, a liquid filling workroom features a few bottling lines, a few gassing tanks, etc. All these consumers can be run and stopped at any time.

The cooling scheme with the assembly circulation tank is applied for cooling liquids with small resources consumption and high temperature difference at the input and output. Cooling liquids to the required temperature can be performed by performing multiple circulations (related to the consumer’s expenditure) through the refrigeration loop. In case of big and constant refrigeration capacities it is more reasonable to use the refrigeration system with an intercooler.
Usually such scheme is applied in manufacturing low-alcohol beverages, quass, in industries with non-constant resources consumption and loads of consumed process liquid. The advantages of the represented scheme include ability to obtain the cooled water with constant temperature regardless of the heat load changes, ability to refrigerate different coolants (ethylene glycol or propylene glycol solution and others), and independency of cold consumers operation from the operation of refrigerating unit.

Obtaining ice water. As a rule ice water is used by one cold consumer with constant consumption and thermal load (or smoothly changing). A film heat exchanger is used as a vaporator in refrigerating machine. It is rather reliable and offers a range of advantages compared to plate and shell-and-tube evaporators.

Cold water is supplied to a consumer by a pump, from the bath located under the evaporator. Heater water returns from a consumer to the upper part of evaporator, spreads evenly along the entire area and drains by even thin layer by the plates. Freon gas boils inside these plates. After cooling to the required temperature the water flows to the bath and is taken by a pump to a cold consumer again. A crossover valve is used in some cases, including possible heat load jumps. This valve is installed in water supply main and spreads water flows in a way to support the output water temperature in predefined limits, Crossover valve regulation helps to obtain the constant water temperature on the output of water-cooling systems with a high precision.

Currently such scheme of producing ice water is widely used in milk cooling systems, on meat-processing factories. Bird’s carcasses are cooled before packing by immersing into the ice water, as well as ham and other products.

Currently complex refrigerating machines, chillers, are widely used as water coolers. They are able to support the temperature of liquid cold agents in preset limits automatically, providing high preciseness (up to +1°С).
Freon gas or ammonia is used as cold agents and water, salt or alcohol water solutions are used as coolants in chillers. Basic equipment package includes a compressor or compressors (reciprocating, helical or spiral), a condenser (with air or water cooling), thermal expansion valve, evaporator, floor circuit and control and measuring apparatus.
The main use of chillers in food industry is beverages production (milk, beer, soda, wine, juices) and plastic packaging manufacture.

Reverse water supply systems or water coolers serve for cooling the industrial equipment, producing ice water. They are used for supplying the water (liquid) of predefined temperature (lower than +25°С — if the higher temperature is required, air refrigerators, “dry cooling towers” are used) to one or more technological equipment units (thermoplastautomats, extruders, lasers, tomographic scanners, vacuum units, etc.).

PRIMEHOLOD is a company that offers a range of services for the design, construction and equipping food processing enterprises, warehouses and trading objects. The services include development of technical solution, selection and supply of equipment, development and manufacture of refrigerating, ventilation systems, assembly, commissioning, warranty and post-warranty maintenance and high-quality repair service.