The benefits of high-class odor removal

Real estate .

Application

Kitchen exhaust treatment

Market

Commercial kitchens

Location

Sweden

Introduction.

The hot kitchen exhaust heats up the garage

In this project, we’re helping out a large shopping centre with over 60 shops and many restaurants.

Located in a major Swedish city, the shopping centre is part of the city’s flourishing culinary scene through its popular food court. Several of Sweden’s most renowned chefs have established fast food establishments there all while adding their own creative touch to them. The high-quality food court, with its unique colosseum-esque layout, was part of a plan by the property owner to increase the value of the shopping centre.

The problem.

It was predicted that the nine restaurants making up the food court would produce a lot of heat, and so, the issue regarding how to treat the kitchen exhaust air needed to be solved.

There were two alternatives: opting for the standard solution—installing ventilation channels with discharge the exhaust air to public outdoor areas—or aiming higher in order to recycle as much energy as possible from the hot air and lower overall energy use.

Since our client is a leading Swedish property owner when it comes to sustainability, the choice was easy: they wanted to be true to the company’s sustainability policy and therefore decided to go with Mellifiq’s solution.

The solution.

An innovative solution was presented early in the planning stage: a solution that would enable recovering heat from the kitchen exhaust to heat up both the mall and the underground garage.

The backbone of the treatment solution was the ozone installation. Two high-performance Ozonetech RENA systems were installed with the capacity to treat kitchen exhaust flows up to 32 400 m3/h (9 000 L/s). The systems not only enable efficient energy recovery by removing grease buildups in the kitchen ducts, they also minimize the risk of fire and keep unpleasant odors away. The automatic systems also eliminate the need to regularly maintain and clean the kitchen ducts by hand. The two Ozonetech RENA systems were placed in the center of the colosseum layout in order to optimize ozone distribution.

However, as the final destination of the exhaust air was the parking garage, the warm odorous air had to be treated even further. A thorough odor removal is crucial since cooking odors containing VOCs (volatile organic compounds) can cause odor problems even at very low VOC concentrations. The odor removal solution must also take into consideration practical limitations such as installation space in addition to making sure that pressure drops are kept at a minimum. The final odor removal solution was a large custom-made polishing step consisting of a Nodora X system, designed from scratch by engineers in order to meet these criteria.

Solution facts.

Mellifiq delivery

Two Ozonetech RENA Kitchen Solutions and a Nodora odor removal system

Dimensions (HxWxD)

1,100 x 695 x 265 mm

Input power

1.5 kW

Noise level

49 dB

Nodora model:

Nodora X

Footprint (WxD)

4,800 x 2,300 mm

Pressure drop

360 Pa

Evaluation.

The ozone installation has performed as expected with an uptime of 100%, and no grease has been found inside the ducts at inspections.

The performance of the complete, custom-made odor removal system was evaluated at six separate occasions during a period of 18 months. Analyses show that the combination of the RENA ozone system and custom-made odor removal system achieve a minimum odor removal rate of 99%. The purified warm air has been released into the shopping mall via the existing ventilation without any issues.