A spiral freezer is a popular way to quickly decrease the temperature of food products before transporting, freezing, or storage. The vertical nature of the conveyor belt allows for a larger volume of product to be frozen in a small space, making it a good option for food processing businesses that have limited floor space. However, despite its compact design and efficient use of space, spiral freezers are significant users of energy. Through Veregy’s work with food industry professionals utilizing spiral freezers, we have identified a number of efficiency improvements that can result in significant energy savings year over year.
Air temperature, flow, and velocity are critical factors when assessing a spiral freezer’s energy performance. Nevertheless, these factors don’t tell the whole story. To understand a freezer’s true energy performance, we recommend analyzing its defrost cycle frequency.
Defrost cycles occur when the evaporator coils in a spiral freezer need to be cleared of ice build-up, or when the infeed and outfeed conveyors need to be cleaned of food debris. Each defrost cycle consumes a large amount of energy, and the timing of these cycles can impact the overall efficiency of the freezer.
A common cause for unnecessary defrost cycles is the failure to update freezer settings as production line changes are implemented. This can lead to a loss of product as the box temperature setpoint is not changed, and can also impact productivity by taking resources away from Quality Assurance testing. Additionally, warm product may need to be returned to production due to the incorrect box temperature, which can further delay workflow and increase costs.
By dynamically adjusting the spiral freezer parameters based on load, Veregy is able to improve freezer efficiency without compromising product quality. In addition, our approach can help to reduce energy consumption by reducing the freeze time needed for most products, which also saves on refrigeration horsepower usage.
Spiral freezers are used in a wide range of applications, including meat, fish, and vegetable roll products, as well as frozen pizzas. Our industrial spiral freezers are a great solution for situations in which high output is required and quality cannot be sacrificed. We can provide custom-engineered packaged and site built spiral freezers, each designed to meet the unique requirements of our customers.
Each industrial spiral freezer is designed with a wide range of features to deliver the highest levels of efficiency and reliability. The patented vapor balance system minimizes air and moisture infiltration into the evaporator, and the reverse-flow center fan design recirculates cryogen vapor for optimum performance. This combination dramatically reduces the freeze time and improves product yield. Its advanced design and materials selection are key to its reliability and ease of maintenance. Our freezers are also equipped with JBT’s Clean-in-Place (CIP) technology, which reduces sanitizing time and labor costs by allowing operators to run multiple cleaning circuits at the same time. This reduces the number of sanitizers and water consumption, and allows a full one-hour cycle to be completed in just under two hours.