Coolant Benching for Cold Chain Packaging: How to Calculate the Right Time
Coolant benching helps prevent temperature-sensitive products from becoming too cold during transit. Learn what affects benching time and how Puffin’s data-led calculator can support safer, more consistent cold chain packing.
Coolant Benching for Cold Chain Packaging: How to Calculate the Right Time
In the cold chain logistics, passive cooling systems are sometimes used. These systems are comprised of insulation and coolants that are used to keep items cool during shipment. Coolants are often frozen at temperatures that are colder than the lowest temperature the shipped items can handle. Using coolants straight out of the freezer creates an opportunity for the product temperature to drop below the lowest allowable point, damaging the goods in the process. For this reason, coolants are often left out of the freezer to warm up to more adequate temperatures before they are packaged alongside the shipped products. The process of warming coolants before use is called benching.
It is important to get the benching duration right as benching for too short a time risks coolants to be too cold. Benching too long results in reduced efficacy of the coolants. This is made more complicated because required benching time will change based on a variety of factors such as coolant type, benching surface material, surrounding temperatures, and initial coolant temperature.
To reduce the guesswork, the risk and uncertainty that comes with it, we have developed a benching calculator. It is a tool that uses data from numerous real-world experiments to estimate how long the benching needs to be performed for.
We use it routinely when conducting product testing to streamline the process and reduce the workload in our technical department.
Using the calculator is quite intuitive.
First, you need to select one of the Puffin coolants for which data is available.
If you are using coolants not available in the selection, you can try picking the closes equivalent but beware that the estimated time may not be suitable for your application.
Next, select a surface on which benching will be performed.
We have tested cardboard as a stand-in for any solid (gapless) surface, since cardboard acts as an insulator, it minimizes surface influence on the coolant. Using a different solid surface to bench may cause the coolant to warm up more than estimated by the calculator. This may reduce efficacy of your coolant but will ensure that it is not too cold.
It is a good idea to monitor your freezer and room temperatures as they are important factors in determining benching time. The more recent and stable the temperatures, the more accurate the estimate will be. Since freezer temperature is used as a representation of the initial coolant temperature, it is advised to freeze the coolants for a sufficient duration so that they reach the ambient freezer temperature. The required freezing time will vary based on freezer and coolant properties as well as the freezer load.
Finally, you should ensure that the estimates provided by the tool are applicable for your use case.
This will help avoid issues arising from important differences between your working environment and our testing conditions.
Looking for more information? Contact us today >
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