MODELING THE ENVIRONMENT WITHIN A WET AIR-COOLED VEGETABLE STORE

This paper presents a model for a wet air-cooled store based on comput ational fluid dynamics. Unlike previous works on cold room modelling p ublished in the literature, the model considers the effects of buoyanc y by coupling the fundamental energy and diffusion equations with the momentum equation. It has been found that the consideration of buoyanc y is important in regions of low air velocity The model which can be a pplied to other types of cold store has been validated using experimen tal results from a wet air-cooled store. A good agreement was found be tween the experimental and simulation results. The modelling results i dentify a number of design problem areas and illustrate the usefulness of the model in investigating the effects of design parameters on the performance of the cold store. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Limited. All rights reserved.