ACR NEWS AWARDS
Anything is possible
W
hat does it take to design a blast freezer capable of handling thousands of pre-prepared airline meals every day? As Hawco’s Mervin Chumun discovered, it requires perseverance, collaboration and plenty of heat load calculations – plus a little help from your friends. As you stand outside DSI Foods in West London, you can hear the planes taking off from Heathrow airport. Every day, thousands of passengers on those planes will be enjoying delicious in-flight meals produced by the chefs at DSI. Every eight hours, 7,300 individually pre-
packed meals are cooked, chilled and frozen to seal in the taste and texture of every ingredient. Once frozen, they are transported the short distance to the airport and loaded onto planes, ready to be enjoyed by people flying all over the world.
In early 2018, DSI Foods asked RS Refrigeration Services in Hampshire to help increase their production capacity, including two walk-in blast chillers and a large blast freezer measuring 11 metres long. The system design began under the watchful eye of project director, Dave Drabble. “The requirements were relatively straightforward – albeit on a large scale,” he says. “We were delighted that RS were selected by DSI based on our years of experience and established reputation within the industry.”
When Mervin Chumun first discussed the project with Mr Drabble, he was immediately intrigued. A typical commercial cold room needs an evaporator with a cooling capacity up to 25kW. Here was the opportunity to get
2019
As sponsor of the Trainee of the Year Award, Hawco is proud to encourage engineers to develop their skills at every stage of their career. For example, when the company’s senior technical engineer, Mervin Chumun, was asked to specify a 130kW blast freezer for a major project in West London, he jumped at the chance.
involved in something much larger and more interesting.
“Blast freezing is all about air flow,” explains Mr Chumun. “You need to make sure that the whole area is blasted, whether you’re chilling or freezing. Even though this project had a comparatively small room, the duty needed to get the job done was huge.”
The first two blast chillers had to bring the temperature of the food down from 80°C to 5°C in just four hours while the blast freezer needed to go all the way down to -18°C within a further four hours. However, the calculations were made more complex with a new trolley of hot food being added to the first chiller every hour while another trolley of chilled or frozen food was removed.
A series of other factors also had to be considered. This included the type and amount of food, packaging, number of trollies and their configuration and the physical size of each room. Mr Chumun started work on the specification of the three coolers, having been provided the design requirements set by RS Refrigeration, using the Mistral software package to generate the necessary heat load calculations.
Trusted advice from LU-VE
Hawco’s Mervin Chumun (left) with RS Refrigeration senior technical engineer Mark Taylor.
Hawco has been a LU-VE distributor for over 25 years. For this project, there were only two or three options capable of achieving the significant duty within such a restricted space. As Mr Chumun explains: “I had not long returned from a tour of the LU-VE factory in Italy where I saw the size of the equipment they are producing on a daily rate. The scale of the equipment was unbelievable. It was clear what could be done.”
16 April 2019
www.acr-news.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
