Modelling the environment within a wet air-cooled vegetable store

This paper presents a model for a wet air-cooled store based on computational fluid dynamics. Unlike previous works on cold room modelling published in the literature, the model considers the effects of buoyancy by coupling the fundamental energy and diffusion equations with the momentum equation. It has been found that the consideration of buoyancy is important in regions of low air velocity The model which can be applied to other types of cold store has been validated using experimental results from a wet air-cooled store. A good agreement was found between the experimental and simulation results. The modelling results identify 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.