Energy Efficient Spiral Freezers

 A spiral freezer is an industrial quick freezing device that is popular for the food processing industry because it freezes foods quickly and efficiently. It’s a great option for many different kinds of foods, including meats and vegetables. Unlike tunnel freezers, spiral freezers have an open design that allows for a lot of product to be frozen in a small footprint.

Despite the fact that spiral freezers have the ability to freeze large quantities of products in a short amount of time, they can be a significant energy consumer. Several factors contribute to this including belt speed, temperature, and air flow. In order to save on energy costs, it’s important to optimize these three factors to maximize freezing efficiency.

One of the biggest challenges in reducing energy consumption is ensuring that belt speed and temperature are set to the optimal settings for the specific product mix at your plant. When the operating conditions are not right, this can lead to wasting energy. Additionally, the equipment may not reach and hold the target product temperature. When this happens, the products will not freeze properly and they may have a negative impact on end use performance (such as breakage or poor shelf life).

In our recent tests with one of our customers that uses spiral freezers to make frozen pizzas, Veregy found that many of their freezers were being under-utilized throughout the day with no product being placed in them for more than 30 minutes at a time. This caused the freezers to constantly run in defrost mode, consuming excess energy and resulting in additional unwanted downtime.

Another way to reduce energy consumption is by adding more monitoring and controls to the facility. This can help increase product quality and allow for greater energy savings. For example, at this customer, we added an automated record of the core temperature of each completed product in the packaging area. This replaced the process of manually recording the results on paper and re-entering them into a computer, which not only reduced labor costs but also allowed for more accurate data tracking.

Cleaning is an important factor in increasing spiral freezers efficiency. By using JBT’s Clean-in-Place (CIP) technology, you can significantly decrease the amount of time required to sanitize the freezer. This can also reduce the risk of cross-contamination between sanitized and un-sanitized parts.

In addition, a better designed freezer can reduce energy consumption by maintaining optimum airflow across the product zone and minimizing the energy needed to freeze your product. The Ultra Series Spiral Freezer uses a constant, high-velocity airflow that is evenly distributed over the product, which helps to minimize moisture loss. This translates into higher product quality, faster freezing cycles, and improved production efficiencies.spiral freezer