Farmfoods looks to low-charge ammonia

UK: Frozen food specialist Farmfoods has chosen low-charge ammonia refrigeration from Star Refrigeration for its new distribution centre in Bristol.

The new facility will supply the Farmfoods southern retail store customers.

Star Refrigeration designed and installed two modular coldstore Azanechiller packages and a chillstore Azanefreezer package, both with spare refrigeration capacity to accommodate future additional load.

The total installation is said to offer numerous benefits including low maintenance and reduced energy consumption, as well as the environmental advantages associated with ammonia as a natural refrigerant.

The Azanechiller is said to offer a significant increase in performance compared with standard HFC chillers. Its packaged design and careful industrial component selection results in an ultra low refrigerant charge of as little as 0.1kg/kW, with all ammonia contained within the chiller and outside the production facility.

The coldstore packages also utilise waste heat recovered from the refrigeration systems to heat a glycol underfloor heater mat contained within the coldstore floor slab.

Both the coldstore and chillstore systems have remote dial in/out access and the maintenance package includes a number of condition based monitoring techniques such as vibration monitoring, thermographic scans and oil sampling.