About Ice Machines and Ice
There are two main ice production methods: Dynamic and Static Systems, and two ways to use ice: either Directly or Indirectly.
Direct usage is mainly in the food sector to chill produce, such as fish, meat, poultry, fruits, and vegetables.
The indirect applications make use of the latent heat cooling capabilities of ice, such as in cold storage, TES (Thermal Energy Storage) systems in air conditioning, process cooling in the food and flower industries, and other heat extraction tasks.

Ice Harvester
Ice harvesters are machines that usually produce large quantities of ice for commercial purposes. Water is circulated over the plates of an evaporator, which is cooled down to –10°C to –25°C by means of a refrigerant, such as Freon. Ice crystals are formed on the surface of the evaporator, until a thickness of 8-10 mm has been reached.
The formed ice is then harvested by heating the evaporator plates with hot gas or electrically to about +5°C. The removed ice is then collected in a sump or ice tank.

Origo Slurry Ice - Air
Slurry Ice - Air / First Generation
For this method a so-called tube-in-tube crystallizer is used. A binary solution (seawater or water with salt, glycol, etc.) is circulated through the inner tube and cooled below its typical freezing point by circulating a refrigerant, like Freon, through the outer tube, which acts as a supercooling heat exchanger.
In most of the existing systems it is necessary to pre-chill the binary solution or cooling medium to about +5°C before it can start forming ice crystals. The ice crystals are then scraped or cut off the crystallizer’s wall, and taken along by the flow of the cooling medium to a collecting tank. The collected ice-water mix continues to be circulated through the slurry ice machine until the desired ice concentration has been reached. Most slurry ice systems manage to reach a 30% real ice concentration. The size of slurry ice crystals ranges from 0.25 to 0.55 mm.
“Flake” Slurry Ice - Air
Certain flake ice machines have been modified to grind the produced flake ice into a sludge. Though the outcome may have the appearance of slurry ice, the ice particles are 2 to 3 times larger than the average slurry ice crystals.
Origo Slurry™ Ice - Air / Second Generation
Origo’s machines make use of a proprietary and patented Wiped Surface Crystallizer, which is designed to produce airy ice crystals inside the cooling medium, instead of on the crystallizer’s walls. They can produce up to 50% real ice concentration, and start making ice with initial water temperatures of up to 35°C. Origos Slurry™ Ice - Air crystals are a minuscule 5 micron (or 0.005 mm) in size. It completely engulfs the produce, leaving no air pockets, which permits a maximum surface contact. This results in the fastest possible heat transfer, chilling the product immediately and to the core, and impeding potentially damaging bacterial growth, and chemical or enzyme reactions, extending the product’s shelf life. There is no chilling medium colder, cleaner, purer, smaller and faster than Origos Slurry Ice - Air™ Ice mix of microscopically small ice crystals, air and seawater.