Over­view

The pro­duc­tion pro­cess in food plants is char­ac­ter­ized by com­plex pro­cessing areas where ma­chines are used for crush­ing and sep­ar­at­ing, dry­ing and heat­ing. The in­di­vidual pro­cessing areas are in­ter­con­nec­ted through vari­ous mech­an­ical and pneu­matic con­veyor sys­tems to en­sure ef­fect­ive hand­ling of the ma­ter­ial. In ad­di­tion, food plants often have vari­ous aux­il­i­ary areas that may range from power­houses with tur­bines and trans­formers to dif­fer­ent types of stor­age and server rooms. In­creas­ing auto­ma­tion and ever higher pro­duc­tion speeds cause a tre­mend­ous in­crease of the risk of an out­break of a fire. Fires can spread rap­idly to other pro­cessing areas due to the closely in­ter­con­nec­ted pro­duc­tion pro­cesses. The high fire load in com­bin­a­tion with the gen­er­a­tion of fine dust particles can quickly cause fires and ex­plo­sions that can bring the en­tire pro­duc­tion pro­cess to a stand­still. Flames, smoke, gas emis­sions, heat – fire has many fa­cets. Minimax has the right fire de­tect­ors for the vari­ous areas within a food plant. Their sig­nals con­verge in the fire de­tec­tion and ex­tin­guish­ing con­trol panel, which is­sues an alarm to the people at risk and the fire bri­gade. In ad­di­tion, the Minimax panel mon­it­ors the in­stalled fire pro­tec­tion sys­tems for proper func­tion­ing and elec­tric­ally trig­gers those ex­tin­guish­ing sys­tems that are not equipped with their own trig­ger­ing ele­ments, e.g. sprink­ler sys­tems. A sprink­ler sys­tem en­sures over­all build­ing pro­tec­tion in a food plant. Minimax of­fers a broad range of sprink­ler types and spe­cial sprink­lers that allow for ideal ad­apt­a­tion of the sprink­ler sys­tem to the re­spect­ive in­stall­a­tion situ­ation in the in­di­vidual pro­tec­ted areas. Areas with spe­cial fire risks or de­ploy­ment con­di­tions re­quire - either in ad­di­tion to or in­stead of the sprink­ler sys­tem - a tailored volume- or equip­ment pro­tec­tion sys­tem. There­fore, de­luge ex­tin­guish­ing sys­tems, Oxeo inert gas ex­tin­guish­ing sys­tems, car­bon di­ox­ide ex­tin­guish­ing sys­tems, halo­car­bon ex­tin­guish­ing sys­tems and spark ex­tin­guish­ing sys­tems are also used in food plants. The alarm and con­di­tion re­ports is­sued by the fire pro­tec­tion sys­tems in­stalled by Minimax, as well as by other sup­pli­ers, can be visu­al­ized on screens by the In­veron haz­ard man­age­ment sys­tem. Struc­tural fire pro­tec­tion, as well as tech­nical sys­tems by Minimax Mo­bile Ser­vices, such as fire ex­tin­guish­ers, wall hy­drants and smoke and heat ex­trac­tion sys­tems, com­plete fire pro­tec­tion in a food plant.