Glastonbury is rated one of the coolest music events but it isn’t only the performers who need to stay cool. Festival-goers consume massive quantities of food and cold drinks, meaning great demand for refrigeration… but only for the duration of the festival; which is why the organisers called on Team Refrigeration to supply a fleet of portable refrigerated storage units. However, there are many more applications for portable refrigeration than supplying cold drinks at hot events – important though that is.

Portable refrigeration units or temperature controlled storage often help food businesses with seasonal supply and of particular relevance to the manufacturing and materials sector, portable refrigeration or temperature controlled capabilities can significantly improve the economics and efficiency of pre-production.

How portable refrigeration can help composite manufacturers

There are usually benefits of scale to be gained in preparing batches of materials and components in advance of their use; but the problem can be storage of pre-prepared stock. That is certainly the case for composite material prepreg – material that has been pre-impregnated with resin but not yet laid up or cured. If a batch is pre-prepared to gain economies of scale, it has to be stored and, in order to avoid even partial curing at room temperature, it is necessary to control the storage temperature to a low ‘cold storage’ level. For most prepregs, cooling or freezing can ensure a longer stored life. But for a business handling batches and orders, investment in permanent cooling might mean having a facility unused during periods when no prepregs are being processed or turning away orders when the facility is full. That is when the flexibility of mobile temperature controlled storage becomes clear.

Temporary additional cold storage for the National Composites Centre

For example, when the National Composites Centre (NCC) needed additional but temporary sub-zero storage for pre-cured components used in a specific project in 2013, they turned to Team Refrigeration who placed a portable unit on the NCC site for the ten month duration of the project. As Rob Ludford, Operations Director of NCC put it; “It provided us with the flexibility we needed.”

Temporary and portable temperature controlled storage helps materials engineering businesses to better manage the workflow they have and avoid the need to turn away orders for lack of suitable storage capacity. Now that really is cool and controlled.

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