Pumpable ice technology

Pumpable ice (PI) technology is a technology to produce fluids or secondary refrigerants, also called coolants, with the viscosity of water or jelly and the cooling capacity of ice. Pumpable ice is typically a slurry of ice crystals or particles ranging from 5 to 10,000 micrometers (1 cm) in diameter and transported in brine, seawater, food liquid, or gas bubbles of air, ozone, or carbon dioxide.

Terminology

Besides generic terms such as pumpable, jelly or slurry ice, there are many trademark names for such coolant, like "Deepchill", “Beluga”, “optim”, “flow”, “fluid”, “jel”, “binary”, “liquid”, “maxim”, “whipped”, “bubble slurry” ice. These trademarks are authorized by industrial ice maker production companies in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom, USA.

Technological process

There are two relatively simple methods for producing pumpable ice. The first is to manufacture commonly used forms of crystal solid ice, such as plate, tube, shell or flake ice, by crushing and mixing it with water. This mixture of different ice concentrations and particle dimensions (ice crystals can vary in length from 200 µm to 10 mm) is passed by pumps from a storage tank to the consumer. The constructions, specifications and applications of current conventional ice makers are described in.