The e-beam decontamination technology meets the ever-increasing health and safety requirements both with regard to consumers as well as operators, while at the same time reducing the environmental impact and space requirements for packaging production lines. It is because industrialists in the agricultural food sector are increasingly faced with this difficulty, that manufacturers such as Serac have developed decontamination solutions based on E-Beam technology.

The capability of the electron beams to efficiently destroy micro-organisms has been well known for decades and its reliability when used in a high-speed industrial production context has been confirmed in numerous applications, in particular for surface cross-linking of plastic materials.

Their use for the decontamination of packaging lines is however far more recent. It is associated with the development of a new generation of emitters, which are more compact and longer lasting, as well as the ground work undertaken by equipment manufacturers in the qualification of processes specific to this field of activity.

Without water or chemical products, E-Beam decontamination has a very low environmental impact. Once the process has been validated, this technology is far easier to control than the decontamination processes using hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) or peracetic acid. It is also a lot faster which enables a reduction in the space required for the decontamination module.

It thus offers all the advantages necessary to meet the needs and expectations of industrialists.