Freeze-Drying & Drying Equipment

They are the same machine under two names, and either name sits on the same side of The Drying Route Crossover. Lyophilization is the technical term for the process, and freeze dryer is what the equipment is called in food plants. Pharmaceutical suppliers tend to use the first word and food equipment builders the second.

On the freeze-drying route it is the fresh product a chamber can load and dry in one batch, not the weight of finished product that comes out; on the belt route it is an hourly evaporation duty, which is throughput multiplied by the gap between your two moisture figures. Raw high-moisture produce carries 80 to 95 percent water, so on those products most of what leaves the chamber is water.[4] Raw beef and poultry cuts run lower, at 56 to 73 percent on USDA’s published figures, so a jerky or pet-treat brief and a berry brief size differently on the same chamber.

No. Moisture percentage is how much water is present; water activity is how available that water is to microorganisms, and it is the condition US regulation names alongside temperature, pH and acidity as something instruments must measure accurately.[3] Two products at the same moisture percentage can sit at different water activities. Your target and the evidence that proves it belong to your food-safety owner, and we size the secondary drying stage against the figure you set.

No. Drying is a dehydration and stabilization step, not a lethality step. For products such as jerky the lethality treatment sits before the dryer in your process, and both the process definition and the acceptance criteria belong to your destination-market food-safety owner.

Belt-route cycles run 6–15 hours on the reference configuration, and where a product lands inside that band is set by piece size, starting water content and the moisture endpoint. On the freeze-drying route the cycle has to be established by trial on your own product, and it is the single number that decides annual output.

Three things account for most of it: an uneven bed depth at the infeed, air short-circuiting through a thin patch instead of passing through the whole load, and a zone set point fighting its neighbor. None of the three is a machine defect. All three are set-up problems, which is why the loaded trial run and the on-site commissioning both exist.

Supply voltage and frequency are set against your site at drawing stage, and the general arrangement records what the machine is built to. Electrical approval in the destination market sits with your authority having jurisdiction and with the contractor performing the installation, and we issue the utility requirement sheet in advance so that work can be planned rather than discovered at commissioning.

Four questions separate a supplier quoting a machine from one quoting a picture. Ask which route they would put your product on and why; ask for the hourly water-removal or evaporation duty the machine is sized to rather than a kilogram-per-hour headline; ask what the lead time is counted from; and ask who performs the acceptance check and against what written criteria. A supplier who answers all four in writing has read your product data.

The honest version of that question is not about the country, it is about what happens after the machine lands. Our answer is written into the terms on this page, and it differs by route.

Belt route — response timing, remote assistance, on-site support and spare-parts availability are confirmed in the quotation and contract.

Freeze-drying route — remote access through the control platform, so our engineers read alarms and recipe logs with you.

Both routes — installation directed by our own engineers, with travel and accommodation quoted as a separate line so there is no surprise on the final invoice.

There is no price list for either route, because both machines are built to a product rather than to a catalog. Drying area or shelf area, condenser duty, heat source, material grade, automation depth and where the project scope stops all move the number more than anything else, and each of those drivers is set out with how to bring it down in Pricing Mechanism, Lead Time and Payment by Route. A figure quoted before anyone has read your product data is a figure for somebody else’s machine.

Plan for a three-phase supply, cooling water, and a steam supply if you choose steam heating. You also need ceiling height for the chamber plus lifting clearance above it, floor loading confirmed by your structural engineer, and clear run-out space in front of the door for trolleys. We issue the requirement sheet before delivery so your contractor can work to it.

Only where the product’s price supports it. Freeze drying holds shape, color, aroma and structure and reaches a lower residual moisture, and it costs more per kilogram of water removed to do it. Published work is blunt that a large class of products is not economically justified for freeze drying.[2]

Yes. Working height, discharge direction, the control interface and the mechanical boundary with the stations either side are fixed at drawing stage, which is the point at which changes cost nothing.

The quotation states the documents supplied with the machine, the packing and shipping method and the acceptance arrangement, so the list is confirmed in writing before you order rather than described in general terms here.

Yes. On the freeze-drying route the spare parts list is agreed at order, and wear items are named in the quotation with their replacement interval. Where a part is a standard industrial component rather than something proprietary to us, we say so, because that means you can source it locally as well as from us.

Sometimes, and the trade-off is the same on both routes. A used commercial freeze dryer or a second-hand belt tunnel was sized for somebody else’s water load, and re-sizing shelf area or belt area on an existing machine usually costs more than the discount saves. Chamber volume and belt length on their own tell you nothing about how long your own product will take.