Oxygen reduction prevents fires in frozen-food store
To ensure that a fire cannot start in a storage facility for frozen food, Apetito, one of Europe’s leading suppliers of multi-portion meal catering, has chosen Wagner’s OxyReduct system for its 31 000 m3 warehouse at Rheine in Germany. The company supplies over 2500 meal varieties to a million people each day, including local authorities and the NHS in the UK.
OxyReduct creates an environment in which fires cannot start by continuously adding nitrogen to the air in a closed area to reduce the oxygen to a level in which most materials will not catch fire. People can still enter and work in the area at any time.
Frozen-food stores are difficult to protect against fire. Heat in the first phase of a fire in high warehouses with a low temperature rises very slowly, so conventional fire-extinguishing systems will not be activated before a fire takes hold.
For this project, there were good reasons to prevent a fire starting at all. The warehouse stores up to 6000 pallets holding about 3 million meals with a stock rotation of 14 days — so any downtime would be unacceptable.
