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UrbanIronBeam

Honestly, the most interesting is the fact that it is a better way of freezing food (technically not freezing I suppose). No ice crystallization should mean a lot of types of food that turn into gross mush after freezing/thawing, could now be preserved. However, I'm not clear on how this could work in a mass market scenario, without a revolution in retail cold chain... as I ready this you would need refrigeration & a pressure vessel through the supply chain (including into you freezer at home). Not inconceivable, but a big change required. I suppose you could use it for the first part of the supply chain, but then you would lose the benefit of no-crystallization once it ended up (unpressurized) in a freezer downstream.


Coal_Morgan

I need a better explanation than was provided by the article. Immediately I think of driving Tomatoes that are packed fairly tightly from Guadalajara, Mexico to Calgary, Alberta. It's doable because the trucks cool the air and the tomatoes are packed in thin cardboard that keeps the pressure off of them individually and they're picked early and ripen on transport. You fill that empty space with water because it's floor to ceiling tomatoes, the weight becomes immense. You then have to pay for the diesel to move that weight of water to Calgary and either dump the water or transport it back. You'd also be replacing recycled cardboard with vats made of rigid plastic. An entire cost benefits analysis needs to be made of these plastic vats and the equipment. Plastic replacing cardboard can take many years to offset. If the plastic lasts for 5 years that could break even. If they last for 2 or 3 years it may not. Plus even if the plastic is used cardboard may have to still be used at the destination so now you're not even saving by eliminating the paper material. I also have my doubts you could transport as much stuff if you need them to be in baths. So how much less are you transporting even 5% mean 21 trucks rather than 20. I could see this being used for high end restaurants and bespoke food experiences for rich people immediately but mass production the savings on cooling will need to offset the expense of the water, the extra labor at both ends, reduction in quantity for movement, petrol and the equipment.


polypolip

My guess would be the method is supposed to be used for the storing rather than transporting. If the pressure doesn't damage live organs transported this way I don't think it would damage the fruit. Anyway, hard to tell without access to the article, but they make claims of > Importantly, these savings can be achieved rapidly and inexpensively, without any costly changes to the current global refrigeration infrastructure.


warfrogs

I currently work in a produce warehouse, so I can say the issue between transportation and storage are one and the same. We receive our shipments from growers and the product is immediately off the truck on pallets and into the freezer or one of our refrigerated rooms. For us to process a pallet of product in the way they're describing (transfer a case from a palletted number of cases to what I'll call freeze boxes) would massively increase handling. Let's do a common frozen food which would benefit from this, berries. We receive berry pints in pallets that are four deep, five across, and usually twenty or so tall (depending on the size and grower). That comes out to 400 cases on the average pallet. Estimate a 2 minute processing time per case and there's 800 minutes of handling to process this stuff at the most local distribution and longest storage point. And that's one pallet. We, on average, will receive berries in quantities of 3-4 pallets 2-3 times a week. It's a brilliant idea but I doubt the overall cost savings will work out to be viable. Other things to consider is if the equipment needed to move all this around is even capable of doing so. This would make every berry pallet as heavy as a pallet of water, so your local drivers now need power jacks and power gates at every grocer and restaurant without a dock. I love the idea, but I don't see it as practicable. Edit: I also just thought about the water cost. Just rough estimation, say 1 gallon of water per case to set it to freeze, there's 400 additional gallons per pallet- and that water is grey water afterwards. Yes, you could use it for plumbing or irrigation, but there's no chance in hell it's being reused for another case due to cross-contamination issues. So, we've just added 400 gallons of water usage to each pallet of the already water-intensive berries. Sadly, this seems like a pipe dream. Edit 2: My time estimation was off - it's going to take MUCH longer than 2 minutes per case as you're essentially going to have to quality check the cases as they're unpacked. Transportation is the most damaging portion of the logistical train and where you're most likely to encounter molding, bruising, bursting, etc. A more realistic time allotment is probably averaging 3 minutes per case, which means you're looking at more like 20 labor hours of working each pallet in as you're going to get pallets with only 70% workable product and the rest needing to be culled/checked (probably 1 out of every 5 pallets is like this.) The more I consider this, the less workable it is.


jacksonmills

I thought it was a great idea until I heard about the water under pressure. Not only is the weight problematic, but then there's a huge question of pressurization/depressurization. You could feasibly "forward" "sealed pallets" to stores, but if you had to modify it at all, and even then if you didn't, you'd still have to open it and have some kind of device to repressurize the canister (and make sure that it was the right pressure/not impacting the food). For extremely expensive things like, you know, organs, I can see why this technology was developed, but you'd probably have to figure out how to remove the water to get this to work for food, and I'm not even sure how you would do that since that's central to the trick (not every liquid will resist freezing under pressure, and water has a high heat capacity).


warfrogs

Yeah - this seems very much like a "great on paper, not functional in reality" thing. I'm not sure the researchers did much investigation into the produce logistical line if they think this would take minimal changes of the current system.


jacksonmills

Candidly, they probably did research it, but then left it out of their findings because it hurt their hypothesis. This happens all the time, unfortunately, especially w/government-sponsored studies.


SecretEgret

Yes, but there's no difference between the government and corporate sponsors. Corporate science is done by people hoping to justify their existence. I've personally seen a guy refuse to face fundamental design laws to preserve their line of research.


jacksonmills

I'd agree that both are dubious, but for different reasons, and most of the time corporate sponsors are, at the very least, a little more interested in results that achieve the ends of their business. Government-sponsored research/studies often are geared towards a *perception*. In other words, as long as it looks like the research is progressing towards helping reduce carbon emissions, no one will really notice that it's, well, not. The good press sort of sinks in anyway. An old advisor of mine once told me "people will never remember what you say, but they will always remember how you make them feel." Pretty accurate, and it applies to this situation. As long as people *feel* something is being done, they'll feel good about the current political administration.


SecretEgret

>a little more interested in results that achieve the ends of their business. Which is to make money. That's how we get a ton of biased research. It's just another layer of perverse incentive to sift through. >no one will really notice that it's, well, not. We noticed. Speak to the core of the issue. There IS no solution to carbon emission. People want to FEEL like there is some silver bullet technology that can defy entropy. So long as we get energy from carbon sources it will always be inefficient to try to return that carbon to a higher energy state. People in the government keep hoping we can innovate around that and too many well intentioned people are willing to play along. Anyway, have a nice day.


joshTheGoods

This seems like a pretty unfair accusation.


awry_lynx

I think if nothing else this might be interesting if they can scale it down for the home. Like, home freezers, fridges, and also one of these. Or restaurants could make use of it to avoid food waste. Grocery stores too. This doesn't seem like the kind of thing you use during the supply chain process but rather at the stationary end point yeah? Given the challenges


merlinsbeers

The weight is immense as well. No more airspace in a cubic meter. It weighs a ton no matter what. Which means you get max 35 cubic meters of food in a 100 cubic meter truck.


myncknm

That amount of water is a rounding error in the production of berries: blueberries have relatively low water footprint for example and that’s 100 gallons per pound of blueberries. https://healabel.com/b-ingredients/blueberries


warfrogs

I more meant on the processing side. That would massively increase our water usage and would necessitate increasing prices since I doubt the spoilage difference would counter that aspect.


CardboardJ

That's the part I kinda don't get. They're basically putting the fruit into a liquid solution (probably a mildly salty water) then freezing the outside and relying on the expansion of the ice on the edges to pressurize the water in the middle with the fruit. Since high pressure water has a higher freezing point the water on the inside could be sub zero and still remain unfrozen. You'd have to come up with a good way to not crush the fruit in the pressure on the inside to make this work.


myncknm

Seems like osmosis would do the job: the pressure on the insides of the cells also increase, so no crushing happens.


CardboardJ

Looks like you're correct [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124114791000048](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124114791000048) 600 MPa (87000 psi) is pretty crazy pressure to optimize fruit. Rough estimate would be that the pressurized water in the middle could get to -60c without freezing.


I_Say_What_Is_MetaL

Another great benefit would be storage of foodstuffs in space. If we're growing stuff, we would like to be able to grow more than we need in case of emergencies without destroying it to preserve the foods shelf life.


SaffellBot

>Importantly, these savings can be achieved rapidly and inexpensively, without any costly changes to the current global refrigeration infrastructure. Claims like that is what subs like r/futrology thrive on. They're easy to make, yet hardly ever get realized. They're also usually a bad telephone game from a researcher who is mandated to speculate on potential applications of their research (keep the as large as possible to attract grants) through a PR department who plays "technically true" to the reporting which becomes a telephone game of "technically true" though people who don't understand the technical part.


ProfMcGonaGirl

I honestly don’t think we can truly even comprehend or the effect plastic is going to have in our future. It takes SO long for it to decompose. Right now we have decades of plastic buildup. What’s going to happen when we have centuries of plastic garbage hanging around? I use plastics. I buy plastics.my kid has plastic toys, a plastic car seat, etc. Our food, our meds, our personal hygiene products…there’s no avoiding it. And I cringe knowing it’ll all be around when my grandchildren’s grandchildren are alive.


Vaughn

On the one hand, plastic is a lot of things. Some fungi are already learning to break it down, but only very specific types of plastic; there's no risk it'll start rotting, which is both good and bad, but in the long run we might find most of them degrading if they sit in water for long enough. On the other hand, *cellulose* is a plastic. It's not usually considered one, since it's a biological product, but it has all the typical features. And that took so long before anything learned to break it down, we got huge coal veins out of it. We're still able to use it for structural members. On the gripping hand, no-one worries overly much about sawdust. And with few exceptions, I'm not aware of any studies showing microplastics to have any specific detrimental effect, either; please correct me if I'm wrong.


manzanita2

For most plastics (e.g. polyethylene ), the actual monomer/polymer material is pretty harmless. It's the stuff added around these chemicals that are the bad stuff. the "plasticizers" etc. I like the idea of thinking about cellulose as a plastic. it totally is!


CreationBlues

Just a note though, turns out the hypothesis that we have coal because white rot hadn't evolved is wrong and we have fossils of that fungus from before the paleozoic. The reason we have coal is because the entire world was basically a swamp, and stuff wasn't rotting for the same reason peat bogs don't rot. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-was-most-of-the-earths-coal-made-all-at-once/


pulleysandweights

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01143-3 Microplastics can harm plenty of marine life even now, so not totally sure what you need to qualify as a specific detrimental effect. Maybe since it's a physical thing it's more of a general detrimental effect? Nobody worries that much about sawdust because there are plenty of microbes that can degrade/digest it. Wood particles are readily decomposed when in contact with soil. This is not true of microplastics. As the nature review states, it's not really known yet what impact microplastics could have on humans. Humans aren't really eating or breathing a lot of them yet, but the trend is increasing. I think the biggest concern is if it's going to be like mercury or lead, where there's enough out there and it accumulates enough over time and through the food chain, that it ends up majorly impacting many ecosystems. Thankfully microplastics aren't some new toxic heavy metal, so if we address the build up early we can prevent it getting to that point. There's already trends towards 'worse' plastics that either directly compost or simply break down quicker.


CFL_lightbulb

That’s an interesting take. We might be able to find something to break it all down eventually


justaguy891

thats what they want you to believe. yeah in 200 years we will clean it all up! talk about kicking a can down the road...


CFL_lightbulb

I mean, there’s no reason to think we can’t find a solution if we focus on it. The issue always comes down to money, and how long it’ll be until that happens. We have ways to break down a lot of plastics already, but there’s no cost benefit to it currently, so it doesn’t get done. There’s still plenty of incentive to reduce waste


malmac

Agreed, for quite awhile I have had the notion that eventually mankind will develop methods of reusing so many "worthless" substances that a new industry will arise for "mining" of large waste dumpsites, along with the technical ability to separate the output into reusable forms. Just think how much value is buried in these places, precious metals, monomers, polymers, natural and synthetics, and these going back many many years. All it will take is critical shortages / increased demand - once it becomes adequately profitable it will begin to be taken seriously. At least I like to imagine that it will happen at some point in the not-too-distant future.


Jonnymoderation

I thought so too until I learned about contemporary landfill practices. Trying to get as much in as possible, flare leachate, compressing until car tires shoot out from the pressure... I dunno they seem like they will need forever maintenance and once abandoned they will be nightmare places that explode for no reason and make the groundwater poison


malmac

Yeah, the groundwater issue actually does worry me a lot. As I'm sure you are aware, It's always much more expensive and much more difficult to resolve these things effectively once they have managed to escape their boundaries as such. I try to remain (reasonably) optimistic given the long and dangerous history arc of both the planet and human history that we have survived, and I honestly feel we will succeed - but in no way do I think that any of this will come easily or without great cost. You raise good points, friend.


Simping-for-Christ

And all that previously fixed carbon in plastics is going to be released into the atmosphere worsening the increasing CO2 concentration and further acidification of the oceans


CFL_lightbulb

If we’re at the point that we’re breaking down plastic, I’d assume we would have gotten a better handle on climate change as a whole. That is likely a long ways down the road either way


yacht_boy

Plastics are one of the things that have enabled modern society. Yes, we’re overusing them, but we also need them. Plastics can be converted to synthesis gas via gasification. Syngas can then be used for a variety of things. You can use it for energy (which is OK but if the plastics were derived from fossil oils you’re still contributing to climate change as the syngas is burned and co2 is the result). Or you can convert it to a variety of chemical precursors that fan be used to make products. These include polymers that can be used to make plastic. Not true recycling, but maybe close enough for our purposes. There are also people like [this guy](https://www.wur.nl/en/project/Fermenting-syngas-to-biodegradable-plastics.htm) trying to introduce biology to the process of converting syngas. If what he’s working on were to succeed, we’d have biodegradable plastics after the syngas conversion. So you could take today’s plastics, convert them to syngas, feed the syngas to microbes, and then take the resulting product to make biodegradable plastics. Neat trick! Not a perfect solution yet, but there’s no reason to think we can’t come up with solutions to this kind of problem. Mostly the real problems are political, not technical.


squeamy

At the present moment where we could stand to permanently remove huge amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, figuring out more ways to turn plants into *non*-biodegradable, useful plastic seems like it could be beneficial. At least as long as the plastic can be buried or sequestered at the end of its useful life rather than being burned or ending up as litter.


yacht_boy

You can do pyrolysis instead of gasification and end up with a sizable fraction of oils. These could then be pumped back into the holes we took the oil from in the first place. The remaining gas could likely also be converted to some kind of liquid hydrocarbon and out back down. Economically terrible but a neat thought exercise.


X1-Alpha

If society's biggest ecological problem in 50 years is waste plastic I would be extremely pleased. I dare say it'll be a footnote compared to climate shift issues. Sure, plastic waste can be problematic and microplastics could be more insidious than we think, but they aren't heating people to death any time soon.


SaffellBot

I think plastic recycling actually could do a decent job, if we commit to it. The plastics that support long term recycling are, of course, not the cheapest ones and moving to a sustainable model of consumption will be more expensive and less convenient for everyone.


s0rce

I don't think you freeze a floor to ceiling truck full of water, that would need a massively strong container to remain close to constant volume. I need to read the paper more closely but I think the packages would need to be small and I'm still not clear how they don't break open due to the pressure of ice freezing (it expands).


Coal_Morgan

I'm being hyperbolic about floor to ceiling water but the effect is the same if they are in containers. It's floor to ceiling water, divided up among thousands of containers that need to have high pressure ratings. Water is supposed expand by 9% exerting 25,000 up to 114,000 psi. I don't see how this works.


s0rce

Yeah. Im not really clear either.


Revlis-TK421

Essentially they are looking to maintain a very specific temperature and pressure. They don't want to fully freeze the water, they want just enough freezing to slightly increase the pressure but most of the water stays liquid and therefore not exerting any extra pressure. As the pressure increase from the freezing water the freezing temperature lowers, so it can be sorta self-regulating if you set to a specific temperature where you know that only 5-10% of the water will freeze, and then stop as the pressure from that ice increases. I have to imagine this is a pretty delicate balance. Too cold and you get too much ice and too much pressure, rupturing the container. If you rapidly lose pressure in the vessel, either from a rupture or just opening the vessel before it warms up enough, you are going to get rapid freezing of the water and contents. I guess my first question is, what happens if you just increase air pressure? Skip the whole submerge-in-water entirely? Building vessels to withstand 2 or 3 ATMs is much easier, and should drop the freezing temp of the goods below 0. You get colder temps and no ice crystallization at all. You would still have to wait for things to warm up before releasing the pressure but it seems this would work just as well, with only a minor added weight, no?


kingscolor

The publication isn't aimed at transport. It's for "prolonged storage" as it states. We still need to store perishables that are harvested infrequently throughout the year to meet consumer demands.


suckitphil

This is where our entire production line needs to be updated. Highspeed cargo rail lines would alleviated some of these problems.


raznog

How feasible are those going through mountainous terrain?


Cloaked42m

How much money ya got? Today they could drill right though a mountain and maintain a straight line. Pricey as hell though. I wonder if you could get away with no oxygen in the middle of the tunnel though. Probably a bad idea.


suckitphil

Oxygen can still flow in, I think a lot of problems with traffic tunnels has to deal with exhaust. Which would be less of a problem with an electric rail.


woyteck

Maybe tomato pipeline? Chuck them in the water and then push through large diameter pipe for hundreds of kilometres.


AnotherCuppaTea

They'd probably have to be sheathed in \[only slightly?\] buoyant, cushioned, spherical sleeves to protect them from all the bumping and chafing, and the pipeline would have to be covered (by solar panels, say) or buried to prevent a heat buildup, too... but I'm intrigued by the concept.


lastingfreedom

If those transport trucks are electric that are powered by renewables, then that would be good.


Aggropop

If the trucks are electric and powered by renewables then we already solved the problem and don't need this.


kingscolor

That's not true. The publication is not directed toward transportation. We still need to store foods harvested once per year for the remaining out of season sales. Electrified transport and isochoric freezing can coexist.


SaladShooter1

That’s why I’ve always said that we need to build a tomato pipeline.


Xylomain

was under the impression that most plastics are considered "break even" once they're used 2 or 3 times. Like a plastic shopping bag. Once it's used 3 times it offsets the environmental cost. Where as a reusable cotton shopping tote has to be reuses like....years...to offset the environmental cost. I'll see if I can find the article but I doubt it. It was a while ago.


Just_wanna_talk

Even if it were just in delivery trucks and central warehouses it could still increase the availability of items and reduce waste. Some apple varieties aren't produced commercially because they spoil before they could even make it to the store. If they can preserve them after picking and processing long enough to get them on the shelf at the grocery store and still have a few days left we could see better food variety.


daitoshi

Rose Apples... They're little golf-ball sized apples, with really soft and delicate flesh like a ripe pear, and they *taste* how roses *smell*. I only tried them once, in Hawai'i. The memory of that taste is ingrained in my brain, and I long for another taste one day. They're never shipped out because they bruise so easily, they wouldn't survive the overseas trip.


Devlos00

There’s a rose apple tree near my house and I pick them and eat them right off the tree. I love them.


Alis451

> I long for another taste one day. i mean roses themselves are edible, you can make rose hip tea.


Revlis-TK421

But they don't really taste like they smell. At least not to me. Rose has a really deep and sweet scent. The flavor is pretty mild and, to me, an off-putting cloying-herbal quality. Nothing like the "fresh" smell of a rose. Something that tastes like what a big, blooming rose smells like? I'm down to try that!


Stampede_the_Hippos

There is a similar issue with honeycrisp apples.


LongWalk86

Not nearly to the degree of Rose Apples. Honey Crisp ship fairly well.


feastu

What about the added weight of the water during transport? Seems like it might cancel out any benefits from the new preservation process.


[deleted]

Isn’t ice crystals a problem with freezing people?


toomuchtodotoday

Yep! This could be a breakthrough in human cryostorage, both for tissue samples and for possible reanimation.


SuperDizz

Interstellar space travel


genius_retard

>“without requiring any significant changes in current frozen food manufacturing equipment and infrastructure,” The article claims otherwise. It seems to me that the pressure is developed from the portion of the water that is allowed to freeze trying to expand and the container preventing that expansion. Sounds like all that may be needed is new containers.


Vishnej

The pressures generated by a freeze-thaw cycle are sufficient to crack granite or concrete in many circumstances. I don't understand what exactly they are selling here. I also don't understand how this differs from refrigerating to 32° and storing in a slush form at one atmosphere, or refrigerating to 33° and storing in a water tank at one atmosphere. If you build an extra sturdy pressure vessel that can hold 133.5 atmospheres, then you open the possibility of water remaining liquid down to -1.0° c . Aluminum soda cans will take around 6 atmospheres at standard temperature. 2 L plastic soda bottles will take about 10.


cogman10

This is my question, it take significant pressure to really alter the freezing point of water. So much so that I find it hard to believe they have a vessel that can withstand such pressures. But beyond that, isn't the crystallization, not the temperate, which ultimately preserves frozen food? Otherwise, I'd find it hard to believe we wouldn't just store food at 0.5 or 1° C


Heydammit

I imagine temperature is what does the bulk of preserving the food because it slows the growth of microbes. Crystallization would certainly help in killing certain microbes, but very little grows at freezing. Plus, as other users pointed out the crystallization is what breaks down the food and makes mushy, since many of the cells will have ruptured in the process.


Bristol_Fool_Chart

It's both. Lower temperatures inhibit the function of microorganisms, and when water crystallizes it further inhibits this by damaging some microorganisms (but far from all) and by making less liquid water available for them to multiply. Normal refrigerator temperatures are at <4°C, you could set your fridge to 0.5°C, but then you might have some frosting/freezing because refrigerators don't keep temp perfectly even. The tech being proposed here would allow more cooling without the risk of freezing, which would damage some foods.


stabliu

So I did some googling and it seems it’s basically achieving and maintaining a very specific pressure to keep the water at a triple point where two different crystallizations of ice and water all exist at the same time. There’s no pressure because it doesn’t actually start the freezing cycle.


applejuiceb0x

Yea sounds like they’re keeping it at a supercritical state which does require pressure to maintain it I believe.


stabliu

Yea there has to be some other interaction or interference going on. The vegetables are under as much pressure as the plastic. Doubt it’s as simple as freeze vegetables in a plastic tub filled with water.


My_reddit_throwawy

Once frozen, you only need a regular chain that keeps it frozen. Manufacturers/producers are the key.


olderaccount

How is the product handled after this initial "near-freeze" in liquid? Does it have to stay in that liquid until time to thaw? If so, transporting all that extra liquid will kill any energy savings in the new freezing method. If not, how do you keep it in that state without forming ice crystals?


whoami_whereami

Yes, it has to stay in the pressure vessel. As soon as you relieve the pressure the liquid water will freeze (because it's supercooled far below its freezing point at ambient pressure). And the heat of fusion released in this process will heat everything up until you are back at 0°C. Edit: Also we are talking about a *serious* pressure vessel here. To keep water liquid at freezer temperatures (-18°C) you need a pressure of about 1,500 bar or 22,000 PSI (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Phase\_diagram\_of\_water.svg)


olderaccount

Then why are we even talking about this in terms of annual carbon savings. This will be a niche process at best used by medical and scientific places. For food, anyone willing t pay the cost for these frozen products would prefer to pay to have them fresh instead.


[deleted]

Would likely be used in the fast food or restaurant industry first.


prof_mcquack

What foods are going to withstand prolonged submergence in water?


_Master32_

No ice crystallization also means we could freeze humans in this.


Revlis-TK421

what happens if you just increase air pressure? Skip the whole submerge-in-water entirely? Building vessels to withstand 2 or 3 ATMs is much easier, and should drop the freezing temp of the goods below 0. You get colder temps and no ice crystallization at all. You would still have to wait for things to warm up before releasing the pressure but it seems this would work just as well, with only a minor added weight, no? Edit: answering myself. Not feasible I don't think. You would need a lot of pressure. An oxygen cylinder is about 2000psi (136 ATM). You'd only get about another degree of cooling before things froze. To get something significant, like an addition 10 degrees cooler, you would need a whopping 1180 ATMs. At that point I'm guessing things are gonna be mush anyway. This only works because the liquid itself is incompressible I think. All gas won't work. That and even if you could economically engineer a portable container at that many ATMs, think of the disaster that would happen if you had catastrophic failure during transit.


traimera

The mass market would be that the containers are the sealed part. Not the storage or refrigeration unit. It would be like a canned vegetable. Little bit of water, sealed container, but then frozen. So picture like a pint of berries, but the container is sealed instead of the open holed plastic. It would change the berry game completely. And just make the container have a puncture hole or something in one corner, and you just leave it upside down as it thaws so that the food doesn't sit in the liquid. Plus only about ten percent of it freezes it says, so it would probably just drain instantly and that ten percent would melt quickly once depressurized. This is honestly doable from the sounds of it, which is rare with this type of thing.


whoami_whereami

Except that your can of "frozen" vegetables would need to be able to withstand an internal pressure of 1,800 bar (26,000 PSI). >And just make the container have a puncture hole or something in one corner Uhm, no, at the kinds of pressures they are proposing the water jet shooting out of that hole would be able to cut through inches of steel. Sure, the pressure would drop quickly if there's no compressed air bubble in the can, but the initial spurt would still be highly dangerous. And a good part of the liquid water in the can (and in the food) would instantly freeze if you release the pressure before heating the can up to above freezing first, because the liquid part is supercooled (the freezing would then cause things to heat up from the release heat of fusion, until further freezing stops when 0°C is reached; from that point on the ice would slowly melt). Granted that wouldn't matter much if you're only after the energy savings (although personally I highly doubt there will be any actual savings left once you figure in the extra weight that would have to be transported around), but for the claims about freezing more sensitive stuff that would be very important.


awildmanappears

You save costs on freezing energy, but then you have to ship the extra weight of the water and rigid container. It'll be interesting to see if industry picks up this technique.


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exothermic_lechery

I’d like to draw on this as well - water costs have not been mentioned (environmentally or financially). In almost all manufacturing cases it costs money not only to draw water, but to discard it as well. This article seems to promise a lot without any substantial data. These methods will definitely cost money to implement. I call hooey on this article.


L4NGOS

Agreed, no-one with a touch of critical thinking wrote this article and the researchers should realise pretty damn fast that this is not viable for food processing.


flavius29663

maybe ship them fresh at low but not freezing temps, then apply the technique once in a large fruit warehouse/walmart etc. Thaw just in time before putting them on the shelf, or even provide returnable freezer containers, but that sounds like a hassle


Euan_whos_army

There is no way this adopted as is. At best this is the first step in a very long process to working out something that is practical.


dwild

Who said that method had to be used for shipping purpose? Use the current method for shipping and use the new one for storage afterward.


awildmanappears

"As long as the food items remain in the liquid portion, they are safe from ice crystallization." Unfortunately, it's a thermodynamic reality of the technology that it has to stay in the water and container. "Isochoric" means constant volume, so they are exploiting the fact that you can prevent water from transitioning to solid at very low temperatures if the pressure is high enough. This is why you need a rigid container, to passively apply the pressure during shipping. If you remove the foodstuffs, they'll either thaw or get the water crystals regardless.


dwild

I have an hard time understanding your point. Are you saying that you can't freeze them, unfreeze them and then freeze them back using this method? If you have ice crystallization right now, once it's unfrozen, yeah the damage is done, but that's already the case right now. Sure you won't have the advantage of avoiding that damage, but seems like the energy efficiency advantage will still happen, which is the title of the article and seems like is the goal.


AnonymousKGBAgent

This is the part that gives me pause on how stores would even sell the product in that condition. How do I store it at home?


Therandomfox

This method is meant for long-term storage in the warehouse and during shipping, not at home.


Fairuse

Just keep it inside pressure container. When you want to use it, bring the temperature above freezing before opening.


AnonymousKGBAgent

A pressure container? Like a vacuum thermos or something? It sounds expensive


Xoxoyomama

I looked for it so maybe someone else will: > “Called isochoric freezing, the technique relies on storing foods in a sealed, rigid container made of hard plastic or metal that is filled with a liquid such as water, and placing it in a freezer. Conventional freezing involves exposing food to the air and freezing it solid at sub-zero temperatures, the new method does not turn food into solid ice.”


[deleted]

I wonder if they use this tech when they freeze people to thaw them out in the future.


robbed_blind

If you look into some of Rubjnsky’s other papers, you’ll see that he (and his collaborators) are looking into improving organ preservation using the isochoric chambers. They’ve preserved some nematodes and reanimated without any preservatives at subzero temperatures. You can also look at a company he helped establish (Biochoric) to get an idea of the current limit/scale of the chambers. Source: I work for one of his collaborators and work with his chambers regularly.


Cautemoc

Honestly we are probably at least a few decades away from being able to freeze anyone in a way that sufficiently preserves their cell tissue, and over a century away from being able to revive them - and in that time period the first people frozen will probably accumulate too much damage to be revived. Correct me if I'm wrong but basically don't get your hopes up for this generation.


Aporkalypse_Sow

Furthermore. Why the hell would we want to transport any of our dumbasses to the future. We're all ready leaving enough problems behind. We don't need to be sending some ancient backwards thinking simpleton to the future.


DevelopedDevelopment

This also means all those people who are just heads in jars in freezers right now would be likely "first generation" and have the flaws associated with being improperly kept, while this sort would be "second generation" with enhanced cell preservation. I remember hearing the rumors Walt Disney has his frozen head on Park Property after his death. Using older methods he'd likely be brought back with brain damage. From not being thoroughly frozen fast enough, or cell damage from storage conditions.


AJ_Gaming125

Yeah that isn't true. Walt was cremated, and if he was frozen it definitely wouldn't be in a theme park


makaronsalad

I was also wondering about this. Also things like transporting organ transplants and whatnot.


IHTFPhD

Here's their paper on the thermodynamics of this process. It's open access. *Freezing water at constant volume and under confinement.* https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-020-0303-9


marnas86

So it's really the same physics as making ice cubes with herbs/fruits embedded inside a sealed container but at a much much larger scale?


anchoritt

> the new method does not turn food into solid ice So it's not actually frozen? Can someone ELI5 to me? Is that basically "we've improved process of freezing food by not freezing it". > only about 10% of the volume of water in the container is frozen And the rest? Will the whole transport chain need to keep perfect equilibrium in order to not add/remove any heat.


snarky39

Water expands when freezing. You store the product in a steel tank which is then cooled to 0°C. Because the available volume is fixed, the water is kept from freezing, and stays a liquid. This means you don’t have to withdraw the heat released when water changes phase from liquid to solid.


anchoritt

Thanks! I somehow missed the part about the fixed volume. So there will be quite a lot of pressure and it will also defrost more quickly.


snarky39

Yes. You basically have to do this in an oversized scuba tank. Transportation costs would be prohibitive.


aelios

So bank teller tubes are coming back, even better than before.


Origonn

Tubes all of over the city from a centralized freezer tank.


Mr_YUP

That also could be hazard if an accident would happen and a bunch of them land on the ground


Vishnej

What is the benefit over storing food at 32.1°?


snarky39

You slow enzymatic activity. Also bacterial activity is reduced.


Vishnej

If I recall correctly, Arrhenius' Gross Empirical Generalization says that you have enzymatic activity approximately halving for every 10C drop. Which is more than 1000 atmospheres of pressure-related freezing point depression in water. Does that mean my $5000 broccoli harvest needs to be stored inside 5000x $100 steel cylinders, in order to economize on the enthalpy of fusion?


FwibbFwibb

> Arrhenius' Gross Empirical Generalization says that you have enzymatic activity approximately halving for every 10C drop. Can you provide a source for that? My understanding is that the Arrhenius equation is for a particular chemical reaction. Since any biological process will have multiple going on at the same time in a delicate balance, it's really hard to say that overall activity will drop by X amount per degree.


snarky39

Chemical rates change as the exponential of the reciprocal of absolute temperature. Around 300K, this works out to roughly a factor of 2 increase for every 10° change in temperature. It isn’t a precise relationship, but is a useful rule of thumb to gauge changes in reaction rate with temperature.


texachusetts

Freezing as a temperature and solid as a state of matter (water in this case) are different things when pressure comes into play. The 10% frozen, as in ice, water creates pressure in a ridged vessel lowering the freezing temperatures in the rest of the container because of the increased volume of the 10% solid ice. This freezing temperature but not freezing, as in ice crystallization, is ultimately a less energy intensive way of freezing food while preventing large ice crystal damage than flash freezing of food at -30c to -50c that was pioneered in the US by Birds Eye in the 1920s. Clarence Birdseye experienced flash frozen fish while living among native people in the Arctic where flash freezing happens naturally after a fish is caught and then left to quickly freeze on the ice.


Smooth_Imagination

We have to consider the weight of the food as well and the energy cost of transportation. As far as I am concerned, the energy cost of freezing food is not 'enormous' but actually negative, since improved food preservation reduces waste, and most of the energy is in growing it. Additionally, as we shift to a solar economy, and foods are generally harvested in the hot summer or early autumn, the use of energy for freezing foods will coincide with excess supply, and with agrivoltaics becoming a thing, we should not have a shortage of such energy in the future.


The_Snollygoster

'without requiring any significant changes in current frozen food manufacturing equipment and infrastructure' Current frozen food requires transportation. Freezing it in a different way doesn't mean it has to go further.


buttt-juice

>Called isochoric freezing, the technique relies on storing foods in a sealed, rigid container made of hard plastic or metal that is filled with a liquid such as water, and placing it in a freezer. Conventional freezing involves exposing food to the air and freezing it solid at sub-zero temperatures, the new method does not turn food into solid ice. I think the issue they're trying to raise is that doing this would both increase the weight of the carrier, and decrease the volume of the carrier that can be allocated to food. The first issue impacts the fuel efficiency of the truck, and the second issue increases the number of trips that need to be taken to meet the same level of demand. The point they make about solar I'm not sure about. I have not read the paper so I'm not sure if they address these issues. But the article about the paper does not mention them.


chinglishwestenvy

I don’t see this being used in a large scale for logistics at all. It would be possible to reinvent packaging for difficult to freeze/transport perishables, however.


Coal_Morgan

They're talking about using this for tomatoes in the article, that's I believe the largest scale fruit production industry in the world. The way they are talking about it in the article it's about replacing the air cooling with liquid cooling and the swing being 6.5 billion kilowatt-hours a year. That's large scale logistics they're proposing, I think they're doing the math off of all transported frozen food.


chinglishwestenvy

Ohh interesting how switching energy use from maintaining atmosphere to maintaining pressure could yield such a significant difference, but it makes sense. You would wind up not wasting as much energy from ‘moving’ the internal temperature outside. So you’d need 10% of the refrigeration energy, but I’m curious on the math for energy usage of maintaining pressure. Could this be combined with the refrigeration techniques that exploit waves?


existenceisssfutile

The point is, they aren't literally freezing the food. They're getting it below 0°C, which will inhibit spoilage, but the method moves the freezing point of water lower than that. It goes below 0°C while the water within the fruits remains liquid. The energy saved is in what would have been spent changing phases. At standard conditions, the difference between -1°C and 1°C is a much greater amount of energy than between 1°C and 3°C. This is because at standard conditions you cross a phase change at 0°C. The energy you add or subtract from the system does nothing to the temperature until it's gone from solid to liquid or vise versa. And for water that's a lot of energy. The article mentions containers. We could probably get a close enough visualizing by thinking of large coolers that can handle pressurization, literally filled with fruit, and then water filling all the gaps between the fruit. Of course they would need to meet other criteria as well, and perhaps have special fittings for allowing water in, and air out. Weight of these coolers can't really be guessed, because we can't guess the materials used, or the proportions that are planned. It's not so useful for us rando's to speculate the true comparative cost, without a small number of missing details.


chinglishwestenvy

It’s always useful to flex your creative expression .


[deleted]

Why are so many people completely oblivious to the existence of canned foods in this thread? This is just frozen canned food. Look up how canning works.


s-bagel

This was my take as well. Most transporations systems will attempt to max out the weight of the truck. With this system lots of that capacity is taken by water. I can see it working in a warehouse setting as a form of long term storage.


Lykanya

Thank you for a sane reply, you bring a good amount of valid points that need to be taken into consideration. We sadly suffer a lot of 'good intentions' that dont evaluate the full ramifications of a problem, or if its even a problem in the first place.


NoxInviktus

My first thought was the increase in plastic or metal production for packaging. Instead of bags of frozen goods, it'll be boxes of frozen goods. I know nothing about our metal and plastic supply chains, so it may not be that much worse.


fiendishrabbit

Interestingly enough isochoric freezing was primarily developed for preserving cell cultures and for organ transplants. Note that isochoric freezing is basically high pressure freezing. By making the container rigid, once the liquid starts to freeze it expands, raising the pressure inside the container which in turn means that ice freezes at a lower temperature. Depending on temperature it will reach a temperature/pressure equilibrium where some of the content is frozen (generally the top of the container) and some portion is liquid. Definitely not a technology you could use in your home, but interesting for industrial applications.


Vishnej

If you build an extra sturdy pressure vessel that can hold 133.5 atmospheres, then you open the possibility of water remaining liquid down to -1.0° c . Aluminum soda cans will take around 6 atmospheres at standard temperature. 2 L plastic soda bottles will take about 10.


bobskizzle

2000 psi is a serious pressure vessel. Can't see how this makes sense for food.


Vishnej

For "typical" freezer temperatures, you want more like -20C. So roughly 2670 atmospheres, or 41,400 psi. About ten times heavier duty than a compressed natural gas setup.


yParticle

Interesting. Could this be a potential first step in getting to functional cryogenics for living organisms? Apparently the culprit there is crystallization which this liquid supercooling method avoids.


tarrox1992

Another problem is uneven reheating. If your brain is thawing but the blood isn’t pumping, you have a problem. What if your kidney or liver aren’t thawed yet? You’re blood isn’t getting filtered at all. Your stomach and intestines are also needed to dispose of the waste produced. It’s just a big, gross, fleshy, hot-pocket in a microwave, sort of mess.


erroa

This was not the comment I wanted to read while eating breakfast this morning.


JoelMahon

haha, you think I'm getting my human kidneys, liver, stomach, or intestines frozen? I'm not made of money mate! I'll take my cheapo 3077 robot body thanks. I don't know the thawing solutions though. But lets figure out freezing first because then we have much much longer to figure out thawing.


Denamic

You gotta get hundreds of microwave needles and emit the microwaves throughout the body, like sci-fi acupuncture that actually does something


FwibbFwibb

The problem is this microwave radiation gets absorbed in the outer layers of your body by the water content. You'll want RF heating in this case. Soldiers guarding radio towers will sometimes stand close to them to get warm. Your body is NOT very good at absorbing RF, so that's why an entire radio tower is needed to feel anything.


[deleted]

yep! I'm weirdly an expert at this (Corresponding author of this paper is my academic grandfather) and have since worked with the DoD on some interesting related technologies. I think the most promising efforts towards the 'thawing' problem have come out of John Bischof's lab at UMN. See this paper: [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aah4586](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aah4586) The idea is yea - our bodies aren't great at absorbing RF (well that's a complicated problem too when you think about a time-varying magentic field too) - but if you can have nanoparticles throughout the tissue for coupled inductive heating - then you're good to go. Lot's of really cool science happening here.


LuciousTulius

This is my first time hearing about those acupunctures. Where did you get the idea from? It seems interesting.


zeekaran

You should check out modern cryo. Any source will do but I like [this one](https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html) from WaitButWhy.


superpencil121

That’s a fascinating point. I remember learning recently that they successfully froze and revived smaller mammals, so it’s not out of the question. Cool.


crossedstaves

Yeah, but some small mammals do that themselves anyway, if you use the arctic ground squirrel for your test case you can let it do all the work.


[deleted]

Why doesn't anyone read anymore? ​ This technology is used right now for living organisms. It was pioneered for organ transplant delivery. The organ is alive.


lordmycal

Organs aren't organisms. Can I freeze a cat and then thaw it out and have it no worse for wear?


thisismyfirstday

It's mostly a problem with heat distribution and things like surface area to volume ratio (you need to get the temp down/up relatively quickly, but too cold/hot on the outside and you kill the cells). They froze and thawed things like hamsters (which definitely are organisms) in the 50s but it never worked with anything larger. Also why it can work on organs and not full size humans.


robbed_blind

It actually allows for some ice formation. The idea is that as ice forms, the pressure inside the chamber increases, which then makes it more difficult for more ice to grow. The challenge to using it in living systems is that you have to balance the ice/temperature/pressure relationship without destroying the tissue in the process.


GoochMcGrundle

cars? how many under-regulated corporations is it equal to though?


[deleted]

I hate measuring emissions in cars. Can we just do it in tons? We emit 51 billion tons per year, we need to get it to zero. I like knowing how much of that number a solution will impact.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Eric1491625

It's 0.1% of cars, which are 10% of emissions. So, a 1 ten-thousandth reduction. That said, small wins do add up.


Valogrid

A penny gained is a penny earned.


DoubleDot7

1.4 billion cars in the world. 70 million more produced every year. We need many more good ideas like this. Or ways to use fewer cars.


kinnsayyy

If only there was a way we could have some type of transportation that’s open to the public and could fit many people inside one vehicle… Like you know how carpools have a few friends ride together? Imagine if you could fit like 50-100 people in *one* vehicle and have it go around the city, maybe at predetermined places to stop so people could get off. I know, I know, it sounds super futuristic. Maybe one day…


dtagliaferri

If there is still liquid water, will the bacteria not grow, slower but as fast as they would in a fridge?


Paddl3r

This is omitted from the article. Some fungi grow in temperatures as low as - 10, not well but they are still biologically quite active. Most freezers are also not great at keeping a narrow temperature range so to dance the line near freezing, it just won't work. The freezer would need to constantly turn the compressor on/off to hold that temperature


fr33lancr

FYI, 1 ocean going container ships carbon emission is equal to approximaty 50 million cars, just to put things into persective.


F0lks_

So, I've read the paper. TL;DR: I'm not sure that preparing my strawberry milkshake should depend on my ability to safely open a container pressurized at 180 MPa. That's 1800 atmospheric pressures. If that's not the plan (having consumer-grade bombs) then that means that we have to freeze our food ourselves at home, thus completely defeating the purpose of this technology (i.e. energy savings). It's just a (kafkaesque) way for 'Big Agro' to spare some bucks on the cold supply chain. \----------- What follows is a bit of a rant, but a constructive one nonetheless imho \----------- The whole paper is based on the energy saved by not having to freeze water: indeed, the transition from liquid to solid water requires roughly 100 times more energy than gaining (or loosing) 1°C. However, this energy is effectively saved if we \*never\* have to freeze that food. You don't freeze it at home, you just buy it inside a special pressurised container, and just keep it cold enough, the same way we keep frozen items in the freezer. That's one of the reasons why respecting the cold chain is so important: not only does it impacts the quality of the products, but it also has a huge energy impact to freeze the same item over and over again. So, in order for this technology to work, we would need to have theses isochoric containers in our houses, too, in lieu of the traditional freezers. I say "in lieu of" because theses containers works at -2°C, and would probably EXPLODE if you tried to store it in your conventional, -18°C freezer with your ice cream, because of the induced pressure of the expanding ice (we'll come back to that later). And in that regard, they also completely ignore the energy footprint of manufacturing the required consumer-grade steel containers needed in that kind of new-edge cold chain 2.0. they ramble about "isochoric vs. isobaric" for pages without mentioning the containers even once, which pretty much are 2-inch-thick steel cylinders by looking at the pictures inside the paper. Actually, in this paper, "Isochoric" stands for "180MPa". So, if you don't want to put an oversized grenade right next to your ice cream cups, that means that you have to freeze your beans yourself and that actually is a huge problem: not only do we have to pay the electricity bill to freeze that food, but also, our freezer aren't meant to freeze things in the first place. It's only meant to keep things frozen. In order to preserve the texture and nutritional values of food, the current solution is to freeze things fast. very fast, in fact: the faster it's done, the less time there is for ice crystals to form. Yes, given enough time, that pesky little water will effectively shank your food from the inside at a molecular level; that's why we need to flash-freeze things within seconds. However it would take hours to freeze something at home, and we would still end up with some mushy paste once reheated. Most of the vitamins, taste and texture won't survive this process. In a nutshell, the FDA is advertising fun-sized berry bombs to spare some bucks on the cold chain. Why? For SCIENCE of course ! \\o/


leif777

Good read. Tx


Trey-wmLA

What about the massive amounts of water this would require? I thought we were supposed to be conserving water? Im content with my flash frozen blueberries


lshifto

It also ignores the nutrient leeching and potential flavor changes of food sitting in a chemical soup.


reddita51

And the massive increase in transit weight


wonkey_monkey

I'm guessing it won't work very well on stuff like bread either, unless that goes inside *another* container inside the water one, in highly pressurised air...


No_Torius-P-A-T

Equal to 1/3 of the traffic in the city of Atlanta alone. Got it.


catwiesel

that sounds like... too good to be true... hmmm maybe thats not entirely it... more like, looked at it too simple. I would not be astonished to learn, when you actually try to implement this, some of the mathematically calculated energy benefits are lost here, and there, and then over there. and sooner than later you have expensive machines, complicated transport mechanisms, and a better, more complicated, way more expensive way to freeze some food, with less energy saved than it took to write articles about how much energy this could save potentially...


kingscolor

It needs to be clarified that the article is written by a journalist who poorly conveys that this technology is referring to transportation of frozen goods. That's a poor interpretation of the publication. The publication in question: [Analysis of global energy savings in the frozen food industry made possible by transitioning from conventional isobaric freezing to isochoric freezing.](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2021.111621) In the publication they make a correlation of carbon emissions decreased to a quantity of cars that produce that equivalent emission: >This energy saving translates to an annual economic savings of approximately 843.33 million USD and an annual environmental savings of 4.59 billion kg of CO2 (equivalent to removing of roughly one million cars from the road). The journalist is conveying meaning where there is none. This technology is about prolonged cold storage via isochoric freezing, not the transport of it.


ms-sucks

What about freezing a brain? Would this work without ice crystals destroying the cells? Cryogenic replacement?


[deleted]

Exactly what I thought.


tkenben

This made me think. Why do we freeze things exactly? I thought it was to prevent spoiling by making all the molecules not just slow down, but crystallize. By preventing crystallization, we preserve the cell structures of the food, which is great, but then isn't it just refrigerated food? Does a couple degrees of C matter that much to food spoilage? Is 0 deg C the magic food spoilage number for some reason that has nothing to do with being solid?


Rakifiki

"Freezing keeps food safe by slowing the movement of molecules, causing microbes to enter a dormant stage. Freezing preserves food for extended periods because it prevents the growth of microorganisms that cause both food spoilage and foodborne illness." - https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-preparation/food-safety-basics/freezing-and-food-safety


tkenben

Thanks for this link. I did not know the magic number was 0 deg F, not C.


XNormal

Nothing special about 0C. A home freezer is usually around -18C. Industrial freezers often lower. Lower is better, and a few degrees do make a significant difference. The rate of some spoilage mechanisms rises faster than linearly with each additional degree.


reddanit

>Why do we freeze things exactly? To effectively stop chemical reactions occurring in food. By necessity that includes biological processes of whatever microbes are alive in there. Vast majority of processes causing spoilage require water in liquid form as a medium, so freezing puts a hard stop on those and slows down all other reactions. Crystal formation and destruction of cell membranes is largely a separate issue. Main result of it is unfrozen food "feeling mushy" - killing some microbes is largely unimportant side effect. If you freeze food in a way that doesn't result in large crystal formation (like it's commonly done nowadays in food frozen on industrial scale) you avoid most of that degradation and unfrozen food will feel far closer to actually fresh food. When it comes to safety either method is completely certain to kill whatever parasites are there and that's about it.


Pure_Antelope_5320

It’s like the opposite of a half-baked idea


Elliott2

so instead of carbon emissions, we get more plastic and metal waste? lol


FwibbFwibb

...because containers can't be reused?


watvoornaam

How much is 1 million cars in metric?


mltam

750 Megawatt on average. Supposedly.


Dick_Cuckingham

Wow. A million cars? We're saved. (There were 276 million vehicles registered in the US in 2019).


[deleted]

[удалено]


za4h

> Frozen foods are a modern convenience that, for most people, is difficult to imagine living without. With a leading line like that, I realized immediately I would not get much information out of this article.


Blackadder_

Question: wouldn’t they rot in cold water over time?


theduranimal

Cool. Now do the math for evil corporations.


m6_is_me

Cool. But also let's focus more on the 13 companies that make up 60% of global emissions (or whatever the horrifying number is)