Wireless chill chain monitoring

Air Fayre Limited are a leading supplier of bespoke contemporary catering to the travel industry. Key to their smooth operation is an unbroken chill chain from production to the airplane. This includes warehouses with temperature controlled stores, assembly and dispatch areas. A vital element in managing the chain is monitoring the warehouse temperatures, and acting on any variation before it can adversely effect production.

The monitoring system needed to be flexible, reliable and expandable so that it could grow as the business expanded. It also needed to provide accurate live and recorded data, and to trigger alarms before the temperature conditions become critical. The chosen solution is Hanwell Instruments Limited's Radiolog system.

The Radiolog system can be tailored to suit site specific requirements. At Air Fayre the receiving stations, the cr-1s, are connected to the operating PCs via LAN adapters. These allow the cr1s to be located in the best radio location rather than using booster units to return the signal to the operating PC.

Sensors are located around the building. These take and transmit the current temperature levels at a user-defined period. The transmitted data is collected by the cr1, logged and then downloaded to a shared network folder via the PC software.

As radio requires no wiring the sensors' locations can be changed, or additional sensors added, without disruptive rewiring work. At the Air Fayre sites, sensors have been located in the stores, assembly and despatch zones to measure the ambient conditions. Additional sensors are located by the freezers, with low temperature probes measuring the internal conditions.

The data is accessed from multiple user PCs across the network, so that a manager in London can easily check Birmingham's conditions. Analysis tools are used to produce summaries, statistics and simple reports. Data can be exported into CSV format for use in 3rd party spreadsheet programs.

Reacting at the appropriate time to a temperature change in the chill chain is key. The Hanwell Radiolog system has user-defined alarm parameters. These have been set to notify users if the temperature changes by 2C over 30 minutes, indicating a chiller or freezer failure. Additional alarms will sound if the high temperature limit is exceeded for longer than a set time period: this ensures alarms are not triggered by momentary rises but do occur if the temperature remains high: reacting every time a door is temporarily opened is not time or cost effective!

The Hanwell Radiolog system has proved a flexible, affordable solution to monitoring a flexible production process.

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Contact Details:

Air Fayre Limited - Simon Levy
Unit 1,2 & 3
International Avenue
Heston
Middlesex TW5 9NJ
United Kingdom

0208 606 1339

Hanwell Instruments Limited - Derek Richardson
The Pixmore Centre
Pixmore Avenue
Letchworth
Hertfordshire
SG6 1JG
United Kingdom

Tel: 0844 815 6229