Ohmic heating, developed by C-Tech Innovation, is an energy efficient and high quality method of heating either a continuous flow or batch quantity of wet or moist material.

Conventional heating methods often struggle to achieve the necessary high rates of heat transfer into the material in order to heat sufficiently without causing product degradation.

Ohmic heating uses an electrical current, passed directly through the body of the material, to cause rapid, uniform heating without the use of hot heat transfer surfaces. Both liquid and solid particulates can be heated, and the system is equally applicable in batch and flow-through systems.

The system has particular advantage where conventional heating suffers from problems such as fouling, ‘burn-on’, where thermal degradation occurs as a result of high temperature gradients, or where faster processing rates are required.

Applications are varied, and include any process which requires the thermal processing of an electrically conducting moist material. Traditionally these have included foodstuffs such as soups, dairy products, fruit products and ready meals including casseroles, sauces, chowders and ragouts. Excellent food quality can be retained with excellent flavour, colour and texture retention.

Additionally ohmic heating can be used in non-food applications such as the processing of sludges and slurries with a high solids content, for example the sterilisation of Category 2 waste where legal requirements can easily be met.

Benefits of the system include improved product qualities, improved heating uniformity and energy efficiencies, reduced system fouling, quiet operation, hygienic and ease of cleaning.

C-Tech Innovation has a range of heaters available for experimental and trial work and can adapt these in-house to suit particular applications.