ZANEMI – Refrigeration and conservation of vegetables

ZANEMI – Refrigeration and conservation of vegetables
ZANEMI – Refrigeration and conservation of vegetables
ZANEMI – Refrigeration and conservation of vegetables
ZANEMI – Refrigeration and conservation of vegetables
ZANEMI – Refrigeration and conservation of vegetables
ZANEMI – Refrigeration and conservation of vegetables

Background

For the renovation of a storage plant of vegetables of the Spanish company Zanemi in Villena (Alicante), Geoclima, together with Spanish client Frimavi, has developed and installed the new refrigeration plant.

Purposes

The project concerned the design and installation of the new refrigeration plant to replace the former one, which was obsolete and had many losses resulting in increased management and maintenance costs.

Project

For this project the customer had initially considered the use of ammonia. However, despite the high COP values, ammonia has several disadvantages and limitations both in terms of cost, as it requires a very complex installation and high running and maintenance costs, and in terms of safety for workers and environment.

In order to avoid these problems, Geoclima, together with Frimavi, has designed and developed a 200 kW (57 ton) GHA heat recovery unit with HFO-1234ze refrigerant with GWP<1.

This is a process cooling plant for food preservation which takes place through a hydro-cooling process: freshly harvested vegetables enter a cooling tunnel at a temperature of about 25 °C and, after a cooling process of 15 minutes in which they get in contact with freezing water, vegetables come out at a temperature of 2 °C. After the cooling process, vegetables are stored at a temperature of 1 ° C. The plant processes 10 tons of vegetables per hour.

The use of HFO-1234ze refrigerant turns out to be a very good solution in this kind of application as HFOs are highly efficient, which adds to its minimal warming profile with reduced indirect emissions, and has the potential to deliver significant cost savings

Results

The solution provided by Geoclima has a Cooling COP between 2.7 and 2.9 (W/W)*, comparable to COP obtainable with ammonia as refrigerant. Compared to a solution with ammonia, however, there is a remarkable reduction in installation and maintenance costs while safety and efficiency levels are increased.


*Cooling kW/TonR = 1.3/1.2 – Cooling EER BTU/Wh = 9.2/9.8