Dynamic modelling of refrigerated truck chambers

• Autor(a) principal: Pitarma, R. A.
• Data de Publicação: 2004
• Outros Autores: Gaspar, Pedro Dinis, Carvalho, Milano Gadelha
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/7254
• topic: Refrigerated chambers; Dynamic modelling; Experimental validation

A refrigerated truck chamber is always under variable conditions. Not only weather changes but also loading and unloading processes can make the chamber behaviour dependent on time. A prediction of relevant properties distributions (velocity, temperature and relative humidity) in refrigerated chambers requires the simultaneous solution, by an iteration process, of the three-dimensional non-linear differential equations for the momentum and heat/mass transport. Basically, these two transport phenomena are coupled by the buoyancy force due to natural convection. However, especially for non-steady state thermal conditions, the high computations times become unattractive the simultaneous integration. For the majority of refrigerated truck chambers, in which the air flow is mainly dominated by forced convection, the equations can be decoupled and the two transport phenomena can be treated separately. Therefore, in the case of dynamic (transient) simulation, this strategy makes the problem much simpler and can strongly reduce the computation time. In this study the simulation method described here was applied in a case study modelling (steady and transient) and was validated by measurements taken from an experimental reduced-scale model.