Systems and methods of treating organic materials are ready known, the following documents can be cited as antecedents: U.S. Pat. No. 5,427,650; WO03026101; WO2007/079968; WO2008/065002; WO2008/010854; U.S. Pat. No. 7,303,160; U.S. Pat. No. 5,091,158; WO03/025101; EP087433; EP2009/009336; GB2452289; GB2456074.
In all cases, problems of high energy consumption, expensive maintenance and, ultimately, high costs of production are formulated. In some cases because the process which is used is complex and slow due to the high number of operations which are necessary to be done from the load to the unload of the product to be sterilized, so that the cycles of the process take unnecessarily longer time and they raise the energy consumption. In other cases because turning-over drums are used or because the container, set to pressure, of the product to be treated, is directly made to spin around its longitudinal axis; leaving in ail of these mechanisms half of the volume of the turning-over drum free of load in order to be able to do the turning-over of the product, what implies an excessive consumption of unproductive saturated vapour, which is only used as filling element in order to maintain the pressure in the containers. In other cases, because the management process is carried out by Bach instead of in continuum. Besides, all of these systems are obliged to install expensive draining systems to evacuate all of the condensed masses which are generated in the process and which do not correspond to the consumption with that heat contribution with the treated production, given the fact that half of the consumed vapour in any of the processes above mentioned is unproductive vapour and, therefore, it goes to waste or to any other application for which it was not meant.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds