Never heard of the acronym either, but I certainly am familiar and apply these principles.
CH3Br is being banned completely in my country next year, for food facilities, but still will be used for fumigating wood. Now the whole point of using CH3Br was the disinfecting effect it had, especially in hard to reach places. In flour mills, where you have "dry" cleaning procedures, it was our first choice.
Does CO2 have the same disinfecting effect? What other alternatives are there. I´ve also heard of thermal means, but our facilities are not sufficientely air tight, so I´m not sure it would be effective.
Thanks for your feedback, guys. Since we use the acronym a lot, it was useful to understand that it is our own jargon, rather than a 'universal' acronym. Now to your specific questions.
CO2 as a fumigant is useless for mills, as it requires exacting temperature and concentration standards to be effective. It is ideally used as a small commodity or single bit of kit fumigant in my view.
Heat can be effective in mills for, again, small pieces of kit, elevators, scroll, screens etc., but it does have limitations. The major one is not the need for air-tightness - in fact it should not be air tight. You want the heat to transfer to the item being treated and the best way to encourage heat transfer is by controlling the airflow where you want it to go. By far the biggest problem with heat is the need to clean properly first. Deposits of flour only a few centimeters thick will insulate well enough to allow many stored product pests to survive. If cleaned first, however, the heat will kill eggs and larvae living in the small spaces that otherwise cannot be cleaned. Elevator legs are a classic example of this. Second problem is that of 'heat sinks'. A bit of kit bolted onto a concrete floor will probably never reach the required temperatures in the spaced between the machine and the concrete. That can, however, be overcome by use of insecticide and good denso-mastic sealers to fully seal these joints.
Whole building head treatment is possible, but the experience is that it has such severe limitations that it is not successful.
Having said all that, many of the same limitations were there for CH3Br - just not well recognised. Ultimately, most whole building CH3Br fumigations actually failed - or else they would not have had to be repeated every 6 or 12 months! And they failed because of the flour left in systems and in the fabric of buildings. Some failures were due to gas loss, but I firmly believe most wa due to the misguided belief that the gas penetrated everywhere. It will not penetrate flour deposits in the limited time most mills had available under gas.
Final fumigant choice is Sulphuryl Fluroide SO2F2. The most common trade names are Vikane nd Profume. Highly toxic, difficult to handle, and limited approvals, if any, in many countries. I have no personal experience of this, having been out of fumigation for a number of years now.
I am a firm believer in good, effective hygiene systems to control pests, rather than reliance on 'quick fixes' that ultimately only mask the real problems
.....and on that controversial note, I'll sneak off!