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MHM Plate Freezers feature refrigerant-filled plates which make direct contact with cartons of product to provide a rapid, energy efficient freeze.

Introducing plate freezers on a commercial scale across Australia has saved approximately 15-20% of the energy consumption used for freezing in the meat industry, resulting in a significant reduction in greenhouse gases.

More than 200 plate freezer installations have been completed in Australia to date, and we have the capability to export these to all markets.

FCF Plate Freezers

Full stack closing, fixed conveyors (FCF) is our most popular plate freezer model due to its simplicity of operation.

All stations in the plate freezer stack are controlled to open and close simultaneously. The conveyors are stationary, and the stack is lifted past the conveyors to allow loading and unloading of cartons from each station.

When freezing 27kg (60lb) meat cartons, FCF plate freezers are designed to run on a 24-hour freezing cycle. To achieve this, the plates can generally be open for up to three hours to load and unload cartons and then closed for 21 hours to complete the freezing process.

Typically, multiple FCF plate freezer stacks are installed at a single processing site, allowing one stack to be opened for loading and unloading while the others remain closed to continue the freezing process.

Applications

FCF freezers are suitable for freezing a range of products, including red meat, pork, poultry and liquid cream, where there is:

• High volume throughput
• Uniformity of carton size

Benefits

• Fast freezing – the typical 48 hour freezing cycle of air blast freezers is reduced to 24 hours in plate freezers – improving the refrigeration index, and reducing stock inventory and time to market
• Energy efficient – typically 20-25% electrical energy saving over blast freezing
• Product output with uniformly flat surfaces to improve product presentation and deliver space efficiencies in palletising, container loading and distribution – delivering a freight saving of 8% in 20-foot containers
• Hands-free operation with automated loading and unloading
• Reliable and low maintenance

Configuration Options

Each plate freezer installation is custom designed to meet the client’s processing requirements. Consideration is given at the design stage to allow flexibility for future additions, extensions and upgrades as product throughput requirements grow.

Plate freezers are available in automatic, semi-automatic or manual configurations, and supplied using ammonia (NH3) as the refrigerant.

Milmeq

Milmeq, whose automated chilling and freezing systems have established the global benchmark for cooling and freezing meat, poultry and dairy products in cartons or crates, were acquired by MHM Automation in 2018.