DEHYDRATION DURING FREEZING AND WHY YOU SHOULDN'T IGNORE IT

But things get even more interesting when it comes to aerodynamics. There is a lot of debate around how to measure the level of dehydration. There are methods such as weight-in-weight-out but which don’t offer a good precision as sometimes it’s impossible to weight the products right before the freezer, so they are weighted before starting the pre-treatment which already changes the weight of the product, making the results inconclusive. But there is a much more reliable factor to look at when trying to understand dehydration levels: snow formation. As an IQF tunnel freezer is a closed system, it is obvious that the snow formed inside the freezer can only come from the product’s lost humidity, therefore the more snow – the more product you lose. There are IQF freezers that have as part of their design a “snow room”, a space where snow can land during production. But how are aerodynamics connected to the amount of snow? Aerodynamics in the IQF freezer determine some key parameters such as air velocity, air pressure and relative humidity. OctoFrost has learned to juggle these parameters in such a way that the snow simply doesn’t have the pre-conditions to form by keeping a certain air velocity and pressure. Therefore 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.