Experimental study of calcium chloride as phase change material for fish cold storage

Indonesia has one of the biggest potentials in the fishery sector in the world, because of two thirds of its region consists of sea. But most of Indonesian fishermen are traditional fishermen which do not have adequate support of cooling technology to keep the fish fresh. Beside of that, for fishermen with small scale boat (under 30 GT) especially traditional fishermen, the cost to provide ice block as a cooling media still become one of the biggest costs that they have to pay. Because of that, they need a cooling media to substitute ice block which has the same function or even better than ice block. The use of phase change material (PCM) is considered to substitute ice block. Based on experimental study on this research, calcium chloride (CaCl2) can be used as fish cold storage to substitute the ice block. According to the result of technical specification testing, calcium chloride (CaCl2) freeze at −4°C and melted at temperature 35°C. The homogeneous consistency of CaCl2 does not influenced by repeated process of cooling and heating. Fish cold storage box testing showed the temperature of fish surface which is stored by CaCl2 is able to stay below 15°C in 106 hours of testing and 10 hours longer than temperature of fish surface which is stored by ice. Organoleptic tests show the freshness of the fish after prototype testing is kept according to minimum standards of fresh fish, even fish with PCM storage get better value than fish with ice storage.