The global fruit juice market is worth between $100 and $140 billion a year, with consumption increasing as consumers turn away from highly processed sugary soft drinks to healthier natural alternatives. While fruit juice concentrate is often delivered in bulk containers, juice for the production of increasingly popular not-from-concentrate (NFC) products is often supplied in frozen form to maintain quality and freshness.
The standard unit for this frozen product is lined 200 litre drums, which are convenient and easy to handle. However, the frozen product needs to be removed, broken up and melted before it can be processed as liquid juice. The HRS I Series provides options to de-pack and crush (the IC Series) and melt (the IM Series) frozen fruit juice.
The IC Series features a roller conveyor which feeds individual drums into a tipper that empties them into the crusher. Here, a specially designed spiked roller crushes the solid ice into an icy slush, which is then transferred to the IM Series re-melting device.
Based on the corrugated tubular heat exchanger technology for which HRS is renowned, the IM Series raises the temperature of the juice from frozen to around 4 deg. C. in 90 seconds. From here, the cold liquid juice can be pumped to a holding tank, or straight into the next process step.
Capable of handling up to 60 drums (12,000 litres) per hour, the HRS I Series uses existing HRS heat exchanger technologies (such as HRS DTA Double Tube and HRS MI Multitube heat exchangers) together with an ice crusher to re-melt both large and small chunks of ice, providing optimal rates of heat transfer and energy efficiency.
As well as de-packing and re-melting, HRS can also supply a full range of processing equipment for the juice manufacturing sector, from full turnkey process lines to individual components including tanks, pasteurisation systems and aseptic filling solutions.
