Design Research Of Food Rapid Thawing Fresh-keeping Cabinet

Frozen food plays a very important role in modern life. The final quality of frozen foods is not only closely related to the freezing technology but also the thawing technology. Hotel and catering industry must be based on different customer's dietary needs at different times to quickly thaw frozen food. This makes the kind and thawing time of frozen food unpredictable, which perplexes hotel and catering industry. Therefore, it is very necessary to design the device which is able to quickly thaw food meanwhile can guarantee food quality. Electricity thawing is a popular way at present. Some researches have shown that electricity thawing is more efficient, less microbial contamination and higher product quality after thawing. However, there is a problem that electicity thawing can not gurantee inner and surface of frozen food thawing at the same time. The heat generated by electricity thawing makes the frozen food surface thawing first and thawed surface of frozen food absorbs more heat and stops electromagnetic waves penetrating the food. This situation will cause the surface of frozen food to be overheated and result in insufficient thawing in frozen food inside and influence the quality of thawing food seriously.This paper analyzes the mechanism of food thawing and the features of far infrared and microwave thawing technology and designs a food fast thawing and refresh-keeping cabinet and produces a prototype. This paper presents the scheme of prototype structure, electrical schematics, control scheme, the hardware and software design of the control system and detailed elaboration of important part of control system. Control system uses STM32F103VET6 as the core and gives control algorithms with the use of sampling temperature, humidity, food weight informations of thawing cabinet and the law of thawing food. Control system completes the frozen food thawing and preservation by controlling thawing apparatus, refrigerating apparatus, humidification devices, sterilization devices and other devices.Experimental results show that the rapid thawing cabinet has features of simple operation, perfect function, stable performance and can achieve a rapid thawing and preservation of frozen foods. The device can meet the hotel and catering industry the need of frozen food rapid thawing and has good promotion application value.