An Eco-friendly and Reusable Heat Source for Self-Heating Food Packaging

Abstract

Self-heating food packaging have a heating module inside it which helps to heat the ready to eat food or beverage in it. Exothermic reaction is used as heat source. Such product can be very useful for military operations, during natural calamities, for mountaineers, and whenever conventional cooking is not possible. It also proves useful in daily life as one can get hot food anywhere without need of microwave oven to reheat the packed food. Chemicals used for exothermic reaction makes it difficult to recycle the Can and also pollute the environment. Chemicals used adds up to high cost of such Food Can. An attempt has been made to find an alternate heat source which is environment friendly, recyclable, cheap and readily available. Phosphorous pent-oxide with water and zeolite are explored for alternate heat source. Heat liberated from the reaction of Phosphorous pent-oxide with water in presence of calcium oxide and heat of adsorption of zeolite is measured and a comparative analysis is done for an alternate heat source.