Applications within the food and beverage industry widely employ heat exchangers, both plate heat exchangers or shell and tube exchangers. This is due to the fact that food products, and beverages such as beer and wine, are all subject to special thermal treatments required for their processing, in order to achieve defined temperatures to enable some reactions or stabilizations, or also in order to ensure their correct conservation.

For example, once the hopping cycle is done, beer has to be cooled before it can be introduced into fermentation equipments, bringing it at the correct temperature required for the fermentation process. Wine is subject to aging processes, or also pasteurization, and each thermal treatment is necessary to obtain organoleptic characteristics that make it a fine quality product.

Another example is milk, which has to be pasteurized using thermal cycles at high temperature and then at low temperature, and then a conservation phase for a certain period of time at a specific temperature.

This is to explain that all of these products are subject to thermal treatments aimed to enhance their characteristics or also to guarantee their proper long-term conservation and food safety of the product on the shelf of a store.

All of these thermal treatments are achieved using heat exchangers, that have to be realized in special and dedicated executions. Being aimed to work in direct contact with food products, indeed these have to be certified exchangers, made using certified materials and with specific surface treatments and finishings, being free of hollow areas and spots ensuring a smooth design where food or dirt can’t accumulate, possibly leading to bacterials proliferation. Furthermore, seals have to be FDA approved, or by some other else responsible subject, in order to guarantee they are suitable and compatible with food contact.

Also the connections have to be of a certain kind, enduring easy disassembling and cleaning operations, and usually the overall construction of the equipments is made in stainless steel. These are in fact equipments aimed to frequent and constant sanitization and washing operations, in order to guarantee maximum safety and compliance with hygienic requirements for food processing.

Stay updated on the latest applications by subscribing our monthly Tempco Newsletter – Solid Temperature.