Brixham Trawler Agents Ltd. has replaced its existing automatic containerised ice plant that was built by Norwegian company Finsam 25 years ago – and again turned to Finsam to supply the new plant.
Finsam (now being merged into Frionordica) won the contract to deliver a similar plant to the one installed 25 years ago, but with a smaller capacity and with the latest available technology.
The plate ice delivered from the old plant has been reported to be the best ice for the fishing fleet in the area, and the end user wanted the same type of ice from the new plant.
In January the new ice plant was shipped over from Norway in three 40ft ISO containers and has now been installed at the same location in Brixham, in the south of England.
The three container modules were all pre-assembled for the plant and they arrived ready to be stacked on the pier. Two containers are modified reefer containers and are used as ice storage. The roof of the bottom container and the floor of the middle container have been removed, and the containers house an ice rake system to extract the ice from the storage and into the conveyor system. The ice storage capacity is 60 tons.
The top container contains all the ice production machinery and the control system. The Finsam plate ice machine has a capacity of 30 tons/day and is connected to a screw compressor unit with a titanium shell and tube seawater cooled condenser. All the ammonia piping was completed in the Frionordica factory so the assembly of the plant including the conveyors, stairs and platforms was completed in less than a week.
The new ice plant is built to very high specifications to meet new requirements in the food industry. All of the refrigeration piping inside the icemaker is made of stainless steel and everything in contact with water and ice is made of non-corrosive materials.
