The customer is a cold chain logistics company located on Nanao Island in Shantou, Guangdong, China. As an important fishing port in eastern Guangdong, Nanao Island is extremely rich in marine resources, with over 1300 species of marine organisms such as fish, shrimp, crabs, shellfish, and algae. Fishing operations are frequent throughout the year, and fishing boats set sail intensively.
With the expansion of the fishing industry, traditional ice making methods are no longer able to meet the growing demand for ice supply. Fishing boats require a large amount of ice blocks for preservation before going out to sea, and limited resources such as electricity, space, and water sources on the island place extremely high demands on the automation level, energy efficiency ratio, and site adaptability of ice making equipment.
The customer urgently needs an efficient, stable, fully automated, and high-capacity ice block production system to ensure the daily supply of ice for hundreds of fishing boats, improve cold chain logistics efficiency, and reduce seafood loss.
Equipment matching:
After multiple investigations and technical comparisons, the customer ultimately chose to cooperate with CBFI. With rich experience in the field of large-scale ice making systems, mature technical solutions, and reliable factory delivery capabilities, CBFI has won high recognition from customers.
Final configuration of the project:
·4 sets of 40.5 ton/day direct cooling ice block machines, with a total daily production capacity of 162 tons;
·A complete set of automated auxiliary equipment, including automatic ice pushing device, dual-purpose water pump for water replenishment and de icing, automatic ice flipping device, intelligent control electrical box, etc;
·Adopting an upper and lower ice well structure design, fully adapting to the special site limitations of the customer's island.
The entire system achieves fully automated operation from ice making, de icing, conveying, ice storage to ice removal, without the need for manual intervention, greatly improving the efficiency and stability of ice supply.
Innovative Design:
Due to the location of the customer's factory on an island and limited land resources, the factory building has a two-story structure and traditional ground based ice removal methods cannot be implemented. The CBFI technical team innovatively designed the "up and down ice wells+double-layer transportation" solution through 3D modeling and field survey:
1. After the ice blocks are formed, they are pushed out by an automatic ice pushing device and fall into the lower horizontal conveyor belt;
2. The conveyor belt delivers the ice blocks to the climbing elevator and vertically transports them to the second floor ice storage facility;
3. The ice storage facility is equipped with a slide, allowing ice blocks to slide from the second floor into the first floor ice outlet for direct loading or temporary storage;
4. The entire process realizes "ice storage upstairs and ice extraction downstairs", fully utilizing vertical space and saving more than 30% of floor space.
This design not only solves the problem of site limitations, but also achieves the goals of shortest ice transport path, lowest energy consumption, and highest efficiency, becoming a model for island type cold chain projects.
Highlights of the plan
1. Energy saving de icing technology: water flushing de icing+water resource recycling
This system adopts advanced water flushing de icing technology. During the de icing process, there is no need to start the compressor. The evaporator surface is uniformly sprayed with high-temperature refrigerant preheating or hot water circulation system to achieve fast and gentle de icing, effectively reducing energy consumption and equipment impact.
It is worth mentioning that the melted water generated during the de icing process is collected through a dedicated pipeline and enters a filtration and purification system for treatment. After meeting the ice making water quality standards, it is recycled for the next round of water replenishment, achieving efficient recycling of water resources and significantly reducing freshwater consumption, in line with the environmental protection concept of green energy conservation and sustainable development.
2. High performance aluminum plate evaporator: serrated flow channel design, high-density ice making layout
·Adopting high-strength all aluminum plate evaporator, with high thermal conductivity, light weight, corrosion resistance, ensuring long-term stable operation;
·The innovative cooling channel adopts a serrated reinforcement design, significantly increasing the heat transfer area and improving heat transfer efficiency, making ice freezing more uniform and faster;
·The configuration standard is 50kg ice molds, with a single block size of 380 × 170 × 1014 mm. Each device is equipped with 405 ice molds, with a compact layout and high production capacity density;
·The system is designed to efficiently produce ice in two batches per day, balancing production capacity and ice temperature quality to meet customers' all-weather ice supply needs.
3. Fully automated intelligent control: PLC central management, one click operation
The entire system is centered around a PLC programmable logic controller, achieving full process automation and intelligent control
·Fully automatic operation mode: covering all processes such as water replenishment, cooling, de icing, ice pushing, flipping, and conveying to ice storage, without manual intervention;
·Human Machine Interface (HMI): Real time display of key parameters such as operating status, temperature, pressure, and fault alarms;
·Remote monitoring and data recording: Supports IoT access, facilitating operation and maintenance management as well as energy efficiency analysis;
·Multiple safety protections: Equipped with automatic protection functions such as water shortage, overload, low temperature, and abnormal liquid level, ensuring the safe and stable operation of the system.
Customer feedback and project outcomes
Since the system was put into operation, it has been running stably with a daily ice supply of over 150 tons, fully meeting the ice demand of surrounding fishing ports. Customer feedback: "Previously, we relied on manual ice moving, which was inefficient and resulted in high losses. Now, Ice Spring's automated system can produce 162 tons of ice per day, with automatic transportation throughout the entire process, fast ice removal, and good ice quality. Fishing boats can arrive at any time, and our cold chain logistics efficiency has been improved by nearly 40%.
