Published 4 issues per year
ISSN Print: 1065-3090
ISSN Online: 1940-4336
Indexed in
A STUDY OF AIR FLOW CHARACTERISTICS IN THE REFRIGERATOR USING PIV AND COMPUTATIONAL SIMULATION
ABSTRACT
It is necessary to understand the characteristics of the circulating air flow inside the household refrigerator in order to reduce energy consumption and find the optimal chilled air distribution within it. To investigate the air flow precisely, particle image velocimetry (PIV) was used to visualize the flow field, and a computational simulation was also conducted. For the visualization experiment, the airflow issuing from two major entrance ports in the frozen food compartment model (made of transparent acrylic resin plate) was visualized by a Nd:YAG pulsed laser light sheet, and a number of flow images were processed by the grey level difference method. A study to obtain turbulence statistics was also performed, and results of the mean velocity field were compared with the computational results. For the computational simulation, a 3D-CAD modeler (UniGraphics) was used to generate a full geometry of the frozen food compartment and the grid generation, and simulations were carried out by a commercial fluid dynamics program, FLUENT, with an RNG k−ε turbulence model. The results of the two approaches showed similar flow fields and revealed that the secondary flow, developed from the initial region of the entrance ports, may play an important role in the real (chilled) flow distribution.
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