Cappelle Belgique

Flake ice contributes
to perfect pigments

Making paint pigments generates significant amounts of heat that must be removed.
Geneglace's flake-ice technology offers an effective solution

Quality control of
final products is
stringent, and
includes exposing
them to sunlight
over several weeks

Cappelle

Known throughout the word as 'Cappelle', Etn Gebroeders Cappelle NV of Kortrijkstraat, Belgium has a reputation for quality pigments used especially by the paints, ink, and plastics industries.
A mixture of chemicals in vats produces dyes and pigments, a process that can generate considerable amounts of heat, which have to be controlled (technically, this process is described as an 'explosive exothermic effect'). At certain critical times in the process, it is essential that the rapidly increasing heeat is reduced, and

specific temperatures are required to sustain the quality of the product. Originally, chilled water was used for cooling, but this was soon replaced by ice, which has been used for a number of years.
Cappelle used to buy block ice and break it up. However, this had two problems - first, some of the sharper lumps could damage the walls of the mixing vats, and secondly, inconsistent lump size made the accurate prediction of cooling times impossible. Cappelle therefore installed flake-ice machines, but production began to outpace the ice supply.
Chips
In Spring 2000, after a review of many options, Cappelle took delivery of a Geneglace F900 flake-ice machine from distributor Vanderbeke sa. This machine produces 25 tonnes of sub-cooled ice at -6degC every 24 hours.
Geneglace claims that its machine offers two main benefits : "First, compared to chips, blocks, or granules of ice, flake-ice has a much larger surface area, and

consequently provides much more efficient thermal exchange from the mixture within the vats. This ensures faster cooling. There is no water mixed with the ice, and this means that the latent heat - the principal source of cooling energy - is 100 per cent available, and 1kg of ice will draw 350kJ of heat from the mix. Thus the consistency of the dry flake-ice enables precise calculations to be made of its cooling input.
'The second principal benefit, endorsed by Cappelle, is the reliability of the Geneglace F900 flake-ice machine, which uses the 'greener' R507 refrigerant'.
At the Cappelle plant, which employs 230 people, there is continuous shift working six days a week. At the critical mixing stage, the sizes of vats employed range from 10 to 40 cu m. It is a convention in the pigments industry that the many formulae of chemicals to match specific pigment requirements are a closely guarded secret, and Capelle follows this convention.

However, a typical application for the flake-ice might be to reduce to 5degC the temperature of a mix that has reached 24degC (and is still risking).
Geneglace explains : "At Capelle, the flake-ice is taken from a holding silo in bins by trolley to the vats, and experienced operators manually introduce the appropriate amount. This enables the mix to go forward to the next stages of the process at the optimum temperature, and with the added advantage of less water in the mix, which reduced time at the later crystallisation stage'.
Stringent
Quality control is stringent at every stage of production. For example, one of the important tests of batches of the finished products is continuous exposure to the sun over several weeks.
Geneglace supplies 30 flake-ice making models throughout the world, and represents a major part of Frigofrance sa based near Nantes, France. Geneglace is distributed is the UK by London-based AFR Refrigeration.

Partners in Europe October 2001