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.

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, and USA.

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.

The idea behind the second method is to create the crystallization process inside of the volume of the cooled liquid. This crystallization inside can be accomplished using vacuum or cooling technologies. In vacuum technology, very low pressure forces a small part of the water to evaporate while the remaining water freezes forming a water-ice mixture. Depending on the additive concentrations, the final temperature of pumpable ice is between zero and –4 °C. The large volume of vapor and an operating pressure of about 6 mbar (600 Pa) require the use of a water vapor compressor with a great swept volume. This technology is economically reasonable and can be recommended for systems with cooling capacity of 300 TR (1 TR = 1 ton of refrigeration = 12,000 BTU/h = 3.516 kW) or larger.

...
Wikipedia