Improvement on characteristics of air flow field in cold storage with vertical wall attached ventilation

Abstract: During the storage of fruits and vegetables, the uniformity of air distribution inside the cold storage store is crucial to affect both the storage quality of fruits or vegetables and energy efficiency of supply air. In the traditional cooling fan direct blowing air supply mode, some local air velocities and temperatures are easily to be larger than those required for cargo area, which would greatly reduce the uniformity of air distribution and the storage quality of fruits and vegetables. Therefore, the reasonable airflow organization is critical to the air distribution of the cold storage and must be carefully considered. In order to improve the uniformity of indoor air distribution, the study introduced the vertical wall attached ventilation which originated applied for indoor climate control of public buildings. To investigate the flow characteristics of the vertical wall attached ventilation, a three-dimensional SST k-ω solution model was established to study the distribution characteristics of the flow field and the cooling effect of the stored cargo. According to the practical array of the stored apples, the cargo area was regarded briefly as porous medium zone. In order to ensure the accuracy of the numerical calculation and the rationality of the mathematical model, grid independence verification and experimental verification were carried out. The accuracy of numerical calculation was studied by comparison with some accepted correlations and the rationality of the mathematical model was proved. The velocity distribution and temperature distribution of typical sections were monitored to illustrate the air flow pattern and temperature distribution characteristics under the vertical wall attached ventilation mode. Meanwhile, compared with the traditional air supply by cooling fan for direct blowing, it was clarified that the vertical wall attached ventilation could form a more uniformly temperature distribution and velocity distribution on the monitoring section and monitoring line. However, the air distribution of monitoring section and monitoring line could not fully reflect the overall temperature and velocity distribution inside the cold storage. Furthermore, the air distribution evaluation index was introduced and calculated in order to fully understand the temperature distribution characteristics of the studied cold storage room. First of all, in order to reflect the uniformity of air distribution, the non-uniformity coefficient of temperature and non-uniformity of velocity were introduced. According to the temperature and velocity values of 40 measuring points in each stack, the velocity non-uniformity coefficient and temperature non-uniformity coefficient were calculated under two air distribution modes. It was manifested that the vertical wall attached ventilation enabled non-uniformity coefficient of temperature and non-uniformity of velocity to decrease by 31% and 47%, respectively at the same air supply flow rate and temperature. Secondly, to evaluate the energy utilization of the air supply, the energy utilization efficiency of the two modes was calculated from monitoring air supply temperature, air return temperature and average temperature in the cargo area. It was indicated that the vertical wall attached ventilation made the energy utilization increase by 19% due to the more sufficient heat exchange between the air and cargo. Since the vertical wall attached ventilation can form a more uniform air distribution under a higher energy utilization rate, it can effectively improve indoor air distribution characteristics and well meet the storage requirements of fruits and vegetables.