Page 36 - Climate Control News April 2020

Products & Services Showcase
Too cold for comfort: Safety in extreme temperatures
WHETHER WORKERS ARE packaging frozen fish or loading dough into blazing furnaces, they must handle temperatures that far exceed the usual comfort and safety limits of the human body. In this article, Tatjana Milenovic, group vice president, food & beverage at ABB, explores the way manufacturers can protect their staff from extreme temperatures.
Maintaining the cold chain plays an instru- mental part in keeping produce fresh from farm to fork and is a key process in food manufactur- ing. Processing raw meat, for example, must be done in a low temperature environment to pre- vent the development of harmful bacteria. While a very cold environment may be ideal for frozen food products, the conditions are not so desira- ble for human workers.
Prolonged cold exposure can produce a multi- tude of health effects including hypothermia, chil- blains and, in very extreme cases, even frostbite.
To help keep workers safe, regular breaks are a
ABOVE: ABB’s TSP341-N can be non-evasively installed to monitor the temperature of a workplace.
LEFT: Tatjana Milenovic, global head of food & beverage segment at ABB.
crucial requirement. While human safety should always come first, it should not ham- per production.
Automation can help solve this issue be- cause picking and packing robots can operate continuously to perform repetitive tasks and reduce the need for human workers in severely low temperatures.
While extremely cold temperatures are dan- gerous, the opposite is also true. In the Glaswe- gian suburb of Hamilton, in Scotland, a cluster of warehouses work tirelessly. As one of eight spe- cialty manufacturing plants belonging to bak- ery company Finsbury Food, the factory produc- es a remarkable 180,000 cakes every week. While impressive, these results aren’t totally unique — advanced automation in batch production al- lows manufacturers to produce thousands of baked goods every day.
However, hundreds of thousands of baked goods require ovens along the conveyor belt to remain in continuous production. Because ovens need to reach temperatures of over 250 degrees Celsius to thoroughly cook products, it’s not long before things start heating up on the shop floor. Overheat- ing can prove fatal, so plant managers must ad- dress dangerously high temperatures promptly.
Maintenance engineers could implement stronger air conditioning or better ventilation across the plant. However, if we consider the del-
icacy of a process such as baking, this method of temperature regulation could im-
pact the quality of products.
Instead, one method to regulate temperatures
in extreme working environments harnesses the benefits of the Internet of Things.
Temperature sensors such as ABB’s TSP341-N can be non-evasively installed to monitor the temperature of a working environment and in- crease safety.
Using a network of sensors to calculate temperature algorithms, the equipment can detect when a temperature falls above or be- low an environment’s average temperature margins between -40 and 400 degrees and alert plant managers via a human machine interface (HMI).
As the sensor is surface mounted and non-inva- sive, it can be fitted without the need to drill a hole and fit a temperature probe and does not require a shutdown of operations during its installation.
Once fitted, workers can quickly take action to rectify the situation or remove employees from the environment until the temperatures have been regulated to a safe level.
While working with the correct tempera- tures is crucial to almost every food manufac- turing process, it is just as important that we ensure the safety of those working in extreme environments.
New series ideal for HVAC testing
www.abb.com
DWYER INSTRUMENTS AUSTRALIA has an- nounced the release of the Series DP3 wireless differential pressure module.
It is a compact, highly accurate, auto-ranging differential pressure module ideal for low flow applications.
The Series DP3 is used in conjunction with the Dwyer Mobile Meter application soft- ware to view pressure drop across filters, static pressure in ducts, and velocity pres-
sures from pitot tubes or air flow stations. Product Applications include: Building commissioning; Building HVAC test and balance; Critical environment testing; in- dustrial process verification and instrumen-
tation validation.
To learn more about the DP3 Series visit:
http://www.dwyer-inst.com.au/Product/ TestEquipment/HVACBalancingInstruments/ SeriesDP3
Series DP3 is ideal for low flow applications.
CLIMATECONTROLNEWS.COM.AU
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