LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 285, 30 October 1933, Page 6

LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS

Those who are concerned with the carriage of foodstuffs overseas know that difficulties are experienced which are not too easily overcome, and it is therefore interesting to note that at the laboratory of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research at East Mailing, near Maidstone

in England, experimental work has been in progress for some time past to provide a solution of the troubles encountered. According- to a Cambridge authority many of the difficulties of coldstoring foodstuffs and of carrying- them oversea in refrigerated ships arise from the fact that foods are either living things such as fruit, or the product of living tilings, such as meat and cheese. Foodstuffs require for their preservation a very precisely controlled environment; on the other hand they generate heat and so upset arrangements for controlling- the temperature; they consume oxygen and poison the atmosphere. The difficulties increase in proportion to the size of the stack of material being cold-stored. Ships’ holds are the largest and the most closely packed of all cold stores. In order to study the subject adequately it has been necessary to construct a replica of a ship’s hold at the laboratory, where, the operations of gradiug, weighing, and packing apples are in progress. The experimental ship’s hold measures 34ft by 30ft by 15ft and has a capacity of nearly 16,000 cubic feet. Boxes of apples have been loaded into it and the total cargo is approximately 130 tons. The cargo will be carefully watched until Christmas and subjected to various conditions. The hold can be refrigerated either by means of brine pipes inside or by circulating the air over an external cooler and back again through the cargo. Each system will be experimented with. The hold has its own “sea,” as it were, in the form of an air jacket, the temperature of which can be fixed at any value. Thus the conditions studied may be those of a ship in the tropics or in the cold regions of the North Atlantic. To explore the temperature variations no fewer than 2T2 thermometers are buried in among the cargo and will be read in another part of the laboratory by means of an electrical mechanism. At the present time the average wastage figure of cargoes such as that being- experimented with is about five per cent. A good season’s consignment of apples to England from certain parts of the Empire reaches 3,000,000 boxes. A considerable saving will, therefore, be effected if the wastage figure can be. reduced, and in view of the fact that New Zealand growers are among the exporters of apples to Britain the experiment is of considerable interest to this Dominion.