A spiral freezer is a food freezing machine that uses stacked, multi-tiered belts to freeze products in an energy efficient manner. This type of quick-freezing machine is a popular choice for facilities with limited floor space, and it is particularly well-suited to frozen foods that require fast freezing times, such as shrimp, vegetable rolls, meat skewers, and other hors d’oeuvres.
Energy savings from advanced monitoring and controls in your spiral freezer can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Spiral freezers are significant users of energy in most plants, and utilizing improved monitoring and controls can help you save money by decreasing your product waste, reducing the frequency of forced defrost cycles, and lowering your utility costs.
Many factors affect the performance of your spiral freezer. These include temperature setpoint, fan speed, and belt speed. Typically, when a production line is changed over from one product to another that requires a different freezer temperature setpoint, the belt and fan speeds are increased in order to ensure that the newly frozen products reach the proper freezer temperature. This results in the over-freezing of some products, which can negatively impact product quality and cause breakage and other issues in end use.
This over-freezing also causes unnecessary and frequent forced defrost cycles that consume energy, increase equipment downtime, and add to the maintenance costs of your freezers. To avoid this, your refrigeration engineers should regularly evaluate these three key operating parameters to find the ideal combination of settings for your freezer that balances your plant’s needs for a high production rate with an acceptable level of energy consumption.
Using advanced monitoring and controls can improve your freezer’s performance, reduce wasted product, lower operational costs, and enable you to take advantage of new business opportunities. These tools allow you to optimize the airflow and refrigeration settings in your spiral freezers so that they are delivering the best possible performance at the lowest energy cost.
RMF’s IQF spiral freezers offer a lower operating cost than C02 and nitrogen freezers due to their efficient mechanical refrigeration method, compact packaged design, and open cage design for easy sanitation and maintenance. Our unique impingement horizontal airflow recirculation system allows each tier of product to receive the coldest air temperature directly from the refrigerated evaporator, resulting in minimal weight loss. This enables your product to reach its final destination in excellent quality and with the shortest dwell time possible, improving yields. Whether you are looking for a standard packaged or a larger capacity site built freezer, we have the solution for your application.