Vacuum cooling and drying of the flour

In the baking industry, it may happen that the flour needs to be cooled before preparing the dough mixtures, so that it can be mixed better with the various accessories, and we can create a more homogeneous dough, or improve its water absorption by drying and reduce the specific flour consumption. Vacuum cooling offers an extremely fast and simple solution for this.

The moisture content of the flour is present in different binding forms, the most strongly connected water molecules are bound by chemical bonds to the organic compounds that make up the flour and to the ordered micellar structures. Most of the water content is attached to the water-loving, hydrophilic groups of organic compounds by physico-chemical bonds, these two strong bond types preserve 70-80% of the flour's water content. The remaining 20-30% adheres to the flour grains with a large specific surface area, primarily to the inner part of the capillaries and pores, with a looser surface binding and adsorption.

This more loosely bound water content is called free water content, and by forcing it to evaporate, we can remove heat from the flour, without damaging the structure, in a natural way, and also by reducing the moisture content.

In the process, the air pressure around any amount of organic material placed in the vacuum chamber is reduced in such a way that the air is pumped out, so due to the reduction in air pressure on the water molecules, the boiling point is continuously reduced, which allows us to control the temperature of the water under gravity conditions. evaporate from the organic matter. As a result, it also emits thermal energy, so it cools down.

With this technology, it doesn't matter what amount of organic matter is involved, the pressure is the same at every point in the space, it acts equally. We can vacuum cool from 1lb to thousands of lbs from 100F to 40F or even higher to even lower temperatures in a matter of minutes, using only the capacity of the vacuum pump technology and the capacity of the vacuum chamber, the process control, and the flour loading a vessel must be sized for it.