Fluent material handling – with receiver or receiver coacting mea – Evacuation apparatus
Reexamination Certificate
2000-11-02
2003-04-08
Walczak, David J. (Department: 3751)
Fluent material handling, with receiver or receiver coacting mea
Evacuation apparatus
C141S008000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06543491
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND
In shipping a package, it often requires a proper temperature control of the object being packed and shipped. For example, frozen food samples are shipped from the present inventor's food manufacturing plant to our customers on a daily basis. These frozen samples require a good control of their packaged temperature in order to keep them frozen and fresh. The packaged temperature can be controlled externally using a refrigerated environment such as the refrigerated compartment of a “refer-truck”. However, for a relatively small size shipment of samples, or other refrigerated products, for convenience and for economical reasons, we often ship the products through a common carrier without refrigeration facilities. A common method of shipping such product through a common carrier is to use a cold substance such as “dried ice” (solid carbon dioxide) to help maintain a frozen product temperature in addition to using a good insulator around the product along with the “dried ice”.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention involves (i) a new insulating package providing good insulation for a product using an ordinary insulating material without the need for using additional cold substances such as the “dried ice” mentioned above, and (ii) a device to prepare such a new package mentioned in (i). The present invention can also be used in conjunction with any other conventional packaging methods such as the one using the “dried ice”, to enhance the result of maintaining the product temperature.
Generally speaking, heat is transferring from one object to another by one or more of the three well-known mechanisms, namely (i) conduction through a solid medium, (ii) radiation through space and (iii) convection through a fluid medium. Strictly speaking, convection and conduction are in the same heat transfer category. But conduction involves only a solid medium, while convection involves heat transfer through the “boundary layer” of a fluid medium at the vicinity of a solid, and is greatly affected by the “free stream velocity” of the medium. In convection, the “film coefficient of heat transfer” which is a function of the “free stream velocity”, is used as the indicator of the transferability of conductive heat from a solid to a fluid or vice versa. The above mentioned transferability is zero in the absence of a fluid medium, namely in a vacuum. The “film coefficient of heat transfer” is equivalent to the “heat conductivity” in conduction. Heat radiation, however, is a different physical phenomenon involving the transferring of microscopic particles and wave from an object to another through space with or without a medium. In a macroscopic investigation of heat radiation, each object has its heat emission, absorption and reflection characteristics. The absorption and reflection characteristics, however, are strictly related to each other. The difference in the total emission and absorption between two given objects results in the net radiation heat transfer from one object to the other.
All three categories of heat transfer mentioned above have been taken into consideration in the present invention so that the overall heat transfer from outside the package to the packaged product or vice versa is minimized.
The temperature enclosed package, in one embodiment, has a reflector surrounding the product, a frame with a cavity placed around the reflector, an insulating enclosure placed around the frame, and a diaphragm placed around the insulating enclosure. A vacuum is produced within the temperature controlled package.
REFERENCES:
patent: 4550046 (1985-10-01), Miller
patent: 5784860 (1998-07-01), Fujikawa et al.
patent: 5875613 (1999-03-01), Maskell
patent: 6161695 (2000-12-01), Nicolais
deVore Peter
Oathout Mark A.
Walczak David J.
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