Podcast: Condensation in Food Plants

Mart Wicker, Product Manager for Food at Polygon U.S., and Nick Kline, Director of Client Development at Polygon U.S., know that ideal conditions in food plants don’t include condensation. They spoke with Tyler Kern about the problems condensation inside a food plant can cause and solutions to keep the moisture at bay.

Listen to the episode here.

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Condensation inside a food plant can quickly cascade into a domino effect of problems that, once present, must be addressed before production can recommence. These moisture issues can occur from plant reconfigurations, moisture barrier leaks, inadequate ventilation, undetected leaks, and even additional workers can add extra humidity to the space.

“The natural flow of a plant actually causes condensation,” Kline said. “One of the key principles of any food processing plant is maintaining your clean to dirty barrier. So, we make the dirty side of the plant the part where we do the harvest and all those sorts of things. That’s what we call negative. It’s sucking air into it. That way, the air that’s on that dirty side does not migrate over to the clean side of the plant, the processing side where we’re making food for people to eat.” The air brought in to keep that clean to dirty airflow properly comes from the outdoors and can bring in additional moisture.

Condensation causes dripping, which causes contaminants to enter the food processing potentially. “The moisture and water vapor in the ceiling or overhead structure helps grow antimicrobials, bacteria that could be harmful to the product and the consumer,” Wicker said. “That’s why it is so important to get rid of it.”

Polygon provides various solutions from dehumidification to pre-and-post cool systems to handle condensation. “We have a strong IoT offering called our ExactAire platform,” Kline said. This platform monitors and controls moisture conditions and can predict issues before they become problems.

Listen to all the episodes of Ideal Conditions. 

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