COLD STORES
Kitchen Garden Produce specifies very low-GWP
refrigerant for cold store Suppliers to major supermarkets are increasingly being asked to demonstrate their environmental credentials through regular audits. One supplier in Lincolnshire has made an important step in reducing its carbon footprint by adopting a sustainable replacement refrigerant, Opteon XL40 (R454A), for its cold storage facility, says David Sowden, technical marketing specialist at Chemours.
W
ithin the European Union under the EU regulation 517/2014, refrigerants with a high Global Warming Potential (GWP) are coming
under severe pressure due to the phasedown of available carbon dioxide equivalents. This has led to a sharp rise in the price and availability of products such as R-404A, R-410A, R407C and even R-134a and therefore refrigerants with a low GWP are being sought by end users. Opteon XL40 (R454A) is an HFO/HFC blend and provides sufficient performance to replace R-404A / R-507A but with a GWP 94% lower than R-404A. With a GWP of just 238, Opteon XL40 is expected to be sustainable with respect to the CO2
good choice to replace R-404A / R-507A and even interim replacements such as R-407F and R-407A in refrigeration equipment that can meet the EN-378 Standard safety requirements.
Major supplier of shallots Kitchen Garden Produce is a premium supplier of foods to UK supermarkets, in particular shallots. Established in 1979 on a 22.5-acre site, the business has steadily grown and now supplies over 5,000 tonnes of shallots to the UK market. This represents approx. 60% of the total UK market. The remainder for the UK market is imported from France. Customers include Sainsbury, Marks & Spencer, Tesco and
Morrisons. These clients expect the product to be supplied at the highest quality and with the best environmental credentials.
equivalents phasedown and therefore a
The Kitchen Garden Produce site in Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, stores up to 700 tonnes of harvested shallots that are destined solely for the UK market. Once harvested, the product is loaded into crates and packed into a 5,000m³ cold store. The store is fitted with a positive ventilation system incorporating a letter box duct, axial flow fans, propane-fired gas burners, and a microprocessor-based control system. The fans are inverter driven to provide speed control and airflow rate of up to 0.15m3 when drying for a proportion of the crop, or 0.05m3 tonne for the whole crop.
It is important to maintain the humidity at the correct
level in the cold store to prevent moulding and rotting of the crop, so the air-on-glycol Δt must be controlled to give 70% to 77% humidity in order to maintain high product quality. Close control is important with a room temperature range of 3.0°C to 3.5°C.
Cooler and the stored product. Evolution of crop storage cooling – R-454A being the subject of this case study. Q R-404A (classification A1 – GWP 3922 -AR4) Technology – DX (direct expansion)
/sec per tonne /sec per
24 July 2022 •
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