General introduction
The carton freezer is designed for rapid and efficient freezing of raw meat products packed in cartons or trays, typically ranging from 10 to 30 kg per pack. It can handle multiple product types simultaneously and functions both as a quick freezer and as a cold storage unit.
Equipped with a fully automatic conveyor system integrated seamlessly into the customer’s production and handling lines, it optimizes space usage and significantly reduces labor requirements. With its high freezing and storage capacity, the carton freezer is an ideal solution for large-scale, continuous production environments. Compare to a traditional blast freezer, it can save 2/3 of the space while still achieve the same production capacity.
The below is the drawing of a carton freezer.
This is the cartons and trays that can be put in a carton freezer
The major features of carton freezer
- Versatility: Capable of freezing pork, beef, poultry, cheese, and various other products.
- Multi-product Capability: Can freeze multiple products with different freezing times simultaneously.
- High Capacity: Supports up to 400 tons of product shelf weight.
- Uniform Freezing Performance: Optimized airflow ensures consistent freezing and low end-temperatures across all products.
- Labor Savings: Reduces manual handling and minimizes the need for workers to operate in cold environments.
- Ürün İzlenebilirliği: Tracks product batch numbers, freezing times, and storage locations.
- Intelligent Control: PLC-based control system with servo-driven movement, automatic fault detection, and remote monitoring.
Working principle:
Products are first transferred by the customer’s conveyor onto the infeed conveyor of the carton freezer. Once the infeed conveyor is fully loaded, a pusher bar moves the cartons or trays onto the shelf of the elevating conveyor, which then lifts them to the designated storage level.
As new products enter, the pusher continues to advance the loaded shelves forward through the freezing tunnel. At the discharge end, another elevating conveyor lowers the shelves back to ground level for unloading.
This continuous cycle ensures a smooth, efficient flow of products throughout the freezing process.
Air flow inside the carton freezer
The fans and evaporators are located at both sides of the shelf. The fans suck the air through the evaporator, which cools the air to temperature around -35 to 38℃, before blowing to all shelf. The horizontal air flow ensures sufficient and even contact and heat transfer between air and the products at all shelf levels. The air flow pattern can minimize the loss of air velocity when the air circulates inside the freezer. the heat transfer efficiency and freezing speed is at least twice better than the traditional blast freezer
How to run carton freezers continuously without stop for defrosting the evaporators:
Some meat processing plants need to run production 24/7 for a week or even two weeks at a time. Under continuous operation, frost will gradually build up on the evaporators. If left unchecked, the ice accumulation can eventually block airflow, preventing cold air from passing through the coils and reducing the evaporator’s cooling performance.
To avoid this, carton freezers use sequential defrosting technology. The system is designed with multiple evaporators and fans, each housed in its own separated compartment. At any given time, one evaporator is defrosted using hot gas or hot glycol, while the other evaporators continue operating in freezing mode.
This arrangement ensures that each evaporator is defrosted before excessive ice buildup occurs, allowing the carton freezer to operate continuously without downtime for defrosting.
Case study
Customer: Muyuan Foods, top 3 pork producer in China
Project: Carton freezer for pork/beef
Key data:
| Ürün | Pork,beaf |
| Pack | Steel trays and carton box |
| Karton boyutları | 600mm*400mm*170mm |
| Infeed temp | +15℃ |
| Out feed temp | -18℃ |
| Evaporative temp | -40℃ |
| Freezer inside temp | -33℃ |
| Freezing time | 24 hours |
| Capacity | 10t/h |
| Product inside freezer | 96t |
| Soğutucu akışkan | R744 |
| Refrigeration load | 655kw |
| Freezer overall dimensions | 34000mm*8300mm*6420mm |
