HiFraser - There are fruits to our labour - If you have ever wondered how primary producers keep insects and mites off the fruit so it gets to the shelves in a good

News » There are fruits to our labour

If you have ever wondered how primary producers keep insects and mites off the fruit so it gets to the shelves in a good condition for you the consumer, we can now shed a little light on the subject.

The Consulting Engineering department of H.I.Fraser provided an international gas supplier with a reliable and innovative engineering service in the development of a clever fumigation system for use in areas of Southeast Asia, where the fruit trade rules. Make no mistake, we don’t claim to have invented the world’s first fruit fumigator, we just used our expertise to come up with a significantly better device.

The contract started when we were asked by our customer to review and improve their existing product. We took a closer look at it and it soon became obvious that changes to the existing system would never achieve our customers requirements. We presented them with a whole new design.

The first hurdle for us was a regional one, the system is mainly used in Southeast Asian countries where the fumigator had to operate with varying electrical power supply as well as varying compressed air pressure levels. The fumigator itself doses very tiny amounts of chemical when in use and the varying pressure and power supplies were causing large variations in final concentrations. We overcame these problems by including a small inbuilt power supply and by designing a novel but very simple and effective dosing system to compensate for the varying flow rate as the inlet pneumatic pressure varied.

The fumigator is used across a wide range of industries from small farms to large transport companies and we wanted to design it so that the same unit could be used from 20 litre fruit boxes up to shipping containers. We were able to build enough flexibility into the design so that simple adjustments to the dosing system allowed the user to re-configure the fumigator for the different applications.