Pre-cooling horticulture produce is the first essential component of the complete cold-chain. Hydro cooling of certain root crops, melons, mangoes and tomatoes is recommended by various researchers. A laboratory scale, shower type hydro-cooler to cool a batch of 50 kg of horticultural produce was designed, developed and evaluated. The hydro-cooler cooled 200 litres of water from 31.7°C to 8.5°C in one hour. The performance of hydro-cooler to pre-cool mangoes was evaluated. During one hour hydro cooling of mangoes the pulp temperature of mangoes dropped from 31.5°C to 14°C which is in the recommended storage range of 13–15°C. The energy requirement for hydro-cooling one batch was estimated to be 3.5 Kw-hr.
Batch-type, Horticultural, Hydro-cooler, Pre-cooling, Small-scale
