Retrain your storage with Restrain

Following over 6 years of development work a joint venture between Greenvale AP and International Controlled Atmosphere (ICA) a new company “Restrain Company Limited” is being formed. The Company will be responsible for the sales and marketing of the Restrain System and will be formerly launched at the BPC Storage Event on 20th May where the system comprising of the Restrain Generator, Sensor and Fuel can be viewed first hand.

First announced in June 2003, The Restrain System has been running successfully in commercial storage for the past 3 years and provides a cost-effective solution for producing and maintaining a stable atmosphere of Ethylene within large or small stores without any store modifications. This current storage season has seen the Restrain System being used to maintain over 40,000 tonnes in an ethylene atmosphere in some 40 stores of varying capacity. The commercial use has been with Greenvale AP and a number of other major prepack Companies. Key to this success is over 6 years experience and the pedigree of the Companies involved in the joint venture. David Bishop of ICA is well known for his 30 years experience in storage controls and has been instrumental in the design and building of the equipment. “The Restrain System has an emphasis on ease of use, incorporating new but reliable, robust and safe technology. The Restrain System simply requires a 13amp socket in store and just “Plugs in”. It has been designed with busy people in mind and engineered to work in dusty storage environments and certainly is not space technology for sterile dust free spacecraft. A major feature of the system is an ethylene sensor which can be checked and calibrated by an agronomist or store manager”

Paul Coleman Head of Technical & Agronomy at Greenvale AP has worked with ethylene for 6 years and leads the industry in its new practical applications. “We were aware of a number of serious practical issues encountered by the Fruit ripening industry when they tried to use a neat ethylene supply and so developed a self contained generating system” he said.

The Restrain Generator converts alcohol using a catalyst to form ethylene & a small amount of water and is capable of maintaining an ethylene atmosphere at 10ppm in a store capacity from 12 to 6000 tonnes. The electronic controls and computer programme for operation and data recording have been rigorously tested by a number of store managers who are very happy with the user friendly, trouble free operation. Remote data collection and alarms are also available features.

The Restrain system has been tested by the British Electrotechnical Approvals Board to meet with their exacting BSEN 60335 standard enabling CE certification which is now a requirement. With a number of Patents filed last year before going public Greenvale AP and ICA expect an interesting future with their joint venture.
“With only 3 months experience and an unproven system our competitors have a lot to learn” Paul Coleman adds.

According to Nick Gilford of the new Restrain Company, costs of the system are not astronomically priced. “Fuel use depends upon the integrity of the individual stores, the whole system is designed to offer a cost effective competitive package as you would expect from the company who first developed the concept.”