CFD parametric study of ambient air velocity magnitude influence in thermal behaviour of open refrigerated display cabinets

• Autor(a) principal: Gaspar, Pedro Dinis
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Outros Autores: Gonçalves, Luís Carlos Carrilho, Ge, Xiao
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/7586
• topic: Fluid Dynamics; CD-ROM; Instructions; Deadlines; Conference site

The thermal behaviour of open refrigerated display cabinets depends of ambient air condition variations such as air temperature, relative humidity and velocity magnitude and orientation. The location of air conditioning system discharge grilles, mass flows originated by pressure differences due to openings to surroundings, and air flow perturbation due to consumers’ passage nearby the frontal opening of the display cabinet, among others, affect the re-circulated air curtain behaviour and consequently the equipment’s overall thermal performance. This study presents a three-dimensional (3D) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling of the physical-mathematical phenomena occurring in an open refrigerated display cabinet, and particularly concerns the aerothermodynamics system of recirculated air curtain, under different magnitude values of the ambient air velocity (according to EN-ISO Standard 23953 and doubled one). A parametric study is undertaken for the air flow and heat transfer numerical predictions to determine the open refrigerated display cabinet’s thermal behaviour and of the re-circulated air curtain, taking into account the ambient air velocity’s magnitude. Results from experimental tests following EN-ISO Standard 23953 for climatic class n.er 3 (Tamb = 25 ºC, amb = 60%) are used to characterize the phenomena near inlets, outlets and physical borders. To prescribe boundary conditions as well as to validate numerical predictions of temperature and velocity distributions, the experimental results are applied.