The meaning of ”dehydration” is generally speaking, the process of water loss. Particularly, the purpose of this article is to focus on a specific type of dehydration, the one that takes place during freezing.
In the moment when the product’s membrane is exposed to cold airflow during freezing, the products’ quality of being fresh is lost and that’s because dehydration can damage almost 4-5% of their initial characteristics. Hypothetically speaking, if you process every year 10,000 tons of product and you lose 5% through dehydration that means you lose at least 500 tons of product per year. Thanks to OctoFrost™ IQF technology, dehydration can be minimized a lot and the secrets of this recipe are two combined factors: short freezing time and the right aerodynamics.
Obviously, a short freezing time is very important because dropping faster the temperature of the product will result in a lower evaporation time; the explanation is that the water from the product gets frozen faster, not having too much time to move into the air. This is what the IQF technology is about – the freezing time of an OctoFrost IQF freezer with a freezing temperature of -26C can last from 2 to 7 minutes, depending on the size of the product.
The difference between an IQF freezer and a cold storage is enormous, having in view that the freezing process in the second situation takes up to 48 hours. More that than, an OctoFrost™ freezer can’t be compared with another IQF freezer because their freezing time is always closely connected to the freezing temperature and usually the time is more or less similar to the OctoFrost freezing time.
You may wonder why all this information about dehydration is so important. The answer is more than obvious: in the moment when a product loses water, it also loses weight and all the product losses are translated into money losses. In other words, a minimized dehydration can increase your profitability.
Having in view the other factor, aerodynamics, it’s really interesting to have a closer view on this because of the many debates of the same problem: how does the level of dehydration can be measured? There are a lot of methods, but none of them can offer a good precision; sometimes, it’s impossible to weight the products right before the freezer and this is the reason why they are weighted before starting the pre-treatment. Anyway, the results are inconclusive, because this process already changes the weight of the product. A really important factor that can explain the dehydration levels is snow formation.
Knowing that an IQF freezer is a closed system, the snow formed inside the freezer can the explained by the product’s lost humidity; in other words, the more snow, the more product you lose. There are IQF freezers provided with space where snow can be stored during production, named ‘’snow room”. And this is how aerodynamics work in the IQF freezer: they determine some key parameters such as air velocity, air pressure, and relative humidity. Keeping a certain air velocity and pressure, snow doesn’t have the pre-conditions to form into an OctoFrost™ IQF freezer.
As a result, the humidity in the air stays constant and does not precipitate in snow – which would decrease the relative humidity and would dehydrate the products even more. That’s why OctoFrost™ IQF freezer don’t have a so-called snow room and do not need one; the aerodynamics of the OctoFrost™ IQF freezer together with the short freezing time, do not allow snow formation and therefore reduces the product dehydration under 1%. There are a lot of methods that can establish the level of dehydration, including the weight of snow after a full day of production.
As a conclusion, to avoid any product loss that will eventually transform into your loss, always look for an efficient freezing equipment!
