Some types of freight are considered “high risk” for the extra care required to ensure they arrive safely and in usable condition. While some items are in this category due to their physical delicacy, such as artwork or glassware, others are at a much higher risk because of heat sensitivity. Too much heat and products, such as consumer electronics, food, or even pharmaceuticals, can lose freshness or efficacy. Unfortunately, heat is everywhere during the logistics journey, so it’s important to have precautions like thermal blanket insulation foil to protect products. Here are the three most common ways heat can transfer to products and raise their temperature.
Conduction
This is the simplest form of heat transfer and is commonly used for everyday activities such as cooking on a stovetop. Heat naturally spreads, and this spread happens in a variety of ways. Conduction is one of the most common, where a heat source transfers heat to whatever it happens to be making physical contact with.
Convection
Convection is the movement of heat through fluids, though, in this case, fluid can mean both water and air. Convection is the primary method of heat transference for one of the most common phenomena we experience, weather. Warm air rises, and once it does, it cools down and, in the cooling process, sinks to a lower height once more.
Radiation
The final method of heat transfer is radiation. This is when an abundant heat source, such as the sun, emits that heat everywhere, throughout the air, and other objects naturally absorb it. Because the sun is an unavoidable source of heat, anything exposed to it, whether that is cargo sitting on the tarmac of an airfield or even a cargo container on the top deck of a ship during a sunny day, absorbs that heat, and then transferring it to other sources through conduction and convection.
Extra Protection Helps
This is where precautions like thermal blanket insulation foil can protect temperature-sensitive products. Whether it is conduction, convection, or radiation, these layers of metalized insulation reflect radiated heat, repel temperature changes from convection, and provide protective coatings that prevent temperature changes from convocation.
There’s no telling when along a logistics chain a delay can occur or something else can go wrong. When that happens, relying only on active environmental maintenance systems can leave your products vulnerable. Thermal blanket insulation foil and other precautions can protect your products when the unexpected happens. If you’d like to know more, contact Protek Cargo with your questions and get a quote.
