Refrigeration and cold chain: optimising and anticipating with remote monitoring of installations

Cold is essential to our lives and is part of our daily routine. Without even realising it, we rely on the cold throughout the day: for food, of course, but also for our comfort, our leisure activities, our health and much more besides.

Although its role is essential and highlighted in this vaccination period, its proper management remains a challenge. Today, for example, two-thirds of the food produced worldwide is thrown away. In terms of emissions, if food waste were a country, it would be the 3^rd largest producer of greenhouse gases.

How can cold management be improved?

Although refrigeration is an integral part of our lives, we are not very familiar with the issues it raises such as implementation difficulties, complex regulations, containment of installations, direct and indirect emissions, process continuity, food safety, etc.

To simplify the daily life of refrigeration professionals and users, Matelex offers a global remote supervision solution for installations. With its permanently accessible web platform and its range of alerts, this solution improves the performance of installations and reduces their environmental impact while making it easier to monitor them.

A web platform dedicated to remote monitoring

The Sentinelle web platform, dedicated to the monitoring of installations, is continuously fed with data from the Intelligent Level Detector (ILD) and its energy management modules. This data from the installations is analysed and returned by Sentinelle in the form of simple indicators, advice and configurable alerts.

This complete and constantly updated vision makes it possible to react as quickly as possible in the event of an anomaly in order to drastically reduce the risks of a break in the cold chain and of loss of goods due to malfunctioning installations. There are numerous benefits:

• Reactivity: rapid interventions thanks to real-time data and alerts (leaks, energy, technical)
• Simplicity: a single platform for centralised monitoring of installations
• Savings: time saving, optimisation of interventions and prevention of breakdowns

The environmental benefits are significant: the reduction of direct emissions from refrigerant leaks and indirect emissions through the optimisation of refrigerant charging and the monitoring of energy drifts significantly diminishes the overall environmental impact of the installations.

Tested on a panel of food retailing installations, the solution allowed 79% of refrigerant quantities to be saved compared to the traditional method. This method, which consists of visiting the installation at periods defined by the regulations (according to the tonnes of CO2 equivalent contained in the latter), does not always allow leaks to be detected within a reasonable time frame. Indeed, it is sufficient for a leak [A1] to occur the day after a visit for it to continue until the next leak test, leading to major losses in the installations that could jeopardise their operation.

Support for the use of connected solutions for refrigeration

To support operators and users in using connected solutions for refrigeration, Matelex provides simplified regulatory information and offers support sessions for the installation and use of its solution.

To learn more about how connected solutions can improve the performance of refrigeration systems, contact us!