Prediction of the frost formation on a cold flat surface

A mathematical model is presented to predict the behavior of frost formation by simultaneously considering the air flow and the frost layer. The present model is validated by comparing with several other analytical models and our experiments. It is found that most of the previous models cause considerable errors depending on the working conditions or the correlations used in predicting the frost thickness growth, whereas the model in this work estimates the thickness, density, and surface temperature of the frost layer more accurately within an error of 10% except the early stage of frosting in comparison with the experimental data. Numerical results are presented for the variations of heat and mass transfer during the frost formation and for the behavior of frost layer growth along the direction of air flow. Also, a correlation between the convective heat and mass transfer is obtained as Le((1-n)) = 0.905 +/- 0.005 in this work. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.