QUANTITATIVE HEAT EXPOSURE RISK ASSESSMENT OF A SHIPMENT USING AN INSULATED BOX AND ICE

摘要

The domestic transport of low volume perishable products within Australia is commonly conducted with the use of insulated boxes and non-refrigerated commercial courier networks. The temperature of the product during transport is governed by the balance of the environmental temperature versus the protection provided by the box's insulation and accompanying coolant (e.g. ice). While for any given day the box, product and coolant properties may be constant, the ability of that package to maintain appropriate product temperatures will be different, due to the day-to-day variations of environmental conditions. Current means of validating (or qualifying) insulated packages include measuring product temperature while exposed to a standard temperature regime or in an "extreme" or even "average" real life circumstance. In either case, these testing procedures do not identify or quantify the likelihood of product failure in a real system, where environmental conditions are different on a daily basis. This paper presents the use of climatic data to estimate environmental temperature and the subsequent use of this data in a heat transfer model to assess the likelihood of package failure. As an example, simulations of an insulated box holding 16 canned beverages packed with ice travelling by road from Sydney to Melbourne were performed for each of the 365 days of the calendar year. The data obtained allows for the quantification of rates of package failure and allows calculation of cost of failure and informed decisions on appropriate corrective action, and ultimately optimisation of the insulated box itself.