The effects of fan and door opening on a cold storage room: a numerical study

Abstract

We present numerical analysis of a cold storage room with a product load, a fan, and a sliding door by solving compressible form of the conservative 3D Navier Stokes equation (without Boussinesq approximation) together with the energy and mass fraction equations. The commercial computer program StarCCM+ is used for this purpose. The sliding door is treated with an overset mesh on a suitable background mesh. A rigid body translation is applied by a field-function to model the opening and closing of the door. The preliminary study captures essential features of the effect of the energy transport and the cooling of the product load by the fan and the hot, moist air exchange through the doorway. The airflow behavior and heat/mass transfer mechanisms are studied and presented for several numerical experiments.