Estudo de caso: ampliação da capacidade de refrigeração na produção de presunto em uma unidade industrial

Abstract

Food preservation through refrigeration is an old and widely used method, thereby knowledge the cooling system to which the product will be submitted to, and performan energy analysis is very important to define operational conditions, in order toimprove the system performance. The aims of the study was to analysis of consumption and energy efficiency of the current industrial cooling system of a cooked ham production line, and propose an improvement in the cooling process, aimed to reducing cooling capacity when production capacity is doubled. Empirical correlations were used to determine the characteristics of the new cooling process, calculated through iterative methods the times and temperatures of the proposed process. Energy consumption and cooling rate were compared between current a new cooling process proposed. Actual cooling process reduces the product temperature from 70 ° C to 8 ° C, through immersion in hilled water tanks cooled by mechanical steam compression system. The proposed process consists of two stepsfor the cooling of ham, the first step through forced convection with air, reducing the product temperature from 70 ° C to 34 ° C, and the second stage reducing the temperature of the product from 34 ° C to 8 ° C through immersion in chilled wate rwith the principle of operation of the refrigeration system by mechanical steam compression. The proposed process, with forced air convection, was presented as feasible alternative for ham cooling process due to it reduced 58.1% of the cooling capacity by mechanical compression of steam system, by reducing 36 ° C in this step. With this configuration it was possible to reduce energy consumption per unit ofproduct from 8.61 kWh to 5.6 kWh of the proposed process. And with the new proposal the mechanical steam compression system capacity can be reduced 58.1%,due to pre-cooling with air reduce cooling capacity need in this stage.