Port terminals play host to giant stacks of shipping containers that sprawl across concrete stands. Seen from afar, they resemble identical bricks of steel, though colour and largely emblazoned shipping logos help to distinguish each unit from its neighbour. They're purposely built this way, designed to adhere to set dimensions. The practice may serve to heighten this apparent landscape of uniform metal boxes, but there's good reason for this look. The internationally adopted Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) standard ensures every freight container from every shore conforms to a design that simplifies transport. Simply put, if you know the size of every unit, then it's easy to calculate how many of them it takes to fill a designated space.
As size and capacity are the two basic exterior factors that have been abbreviated into a concise set of dimensions that leaves freight containers the duty of defining internal characteristics. Dropping down to the most basic details, we can cleave these properties in two. There's the normal cargo container and the refrigerated container, a class referred to with some familiarity as a 'reefer.'
Normal Freight Container - A general purpose dry container for transporting most payloads. Textiles and automobile parts are two examples of cargo held here.
Refrigerated Container - A special type of freight container with a powered refrigeration unit. The cargo transported in a 'reefer' is perishable, thus it will spoil unless kept within a climate-controlled environment. Typical examples of reefer cargo include fruit, vegetables, meat, and sensitive pharmaceutical products.
It's true that refrigerated containers present more challenges, especially when food has to be kept fresh until it reaches the shelf, but dry containers have their own specifications to follow. For example, a standard dry container uses a secure double door arrangement set at one of the ends of the unit. It adopts the standard TEU capacity format and thus adheres to logistical guidelines. Having said that, there's an impressive array of variations within the dry intermodal container outline. Sometimes the doors are mounted in the ceiling, a perfect placement for unloading loose content such as minerals or ore. On the other hand, the refrigerated freight unit is always completely sealed, which is a necessity in design when creating a climate-controlled internal atmosphere.
A dry container can be fabricated from welded steel panels or aluminium, and these manufacturing principles are shared by reefers, although high-grade steel is the preferred material as it shrugs off heavy impacts during careless loading cycles. One point of note, the refrigerated container adds weight to its overall outline due to the refrigeration module, and that weight is increased by thickening the walls of the container with substantial amounts of insulation. This is one compelling reason to construct reefers from aluminium.
In conclusion, these two types of containers can sit side by side, but a reefer requires some type of umbilical, a power supply or reefer point that can supply electrical current to keep the refrigeration unit purring along and the contents frosty.
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