Simplified modelling of air flows in refrigerated vehicles

This work is in keeping with a research activity led by the Cemagref aiming to optimise systems of air distribution in refrigerated vehicles in order to decrease the temperature scattering within the loading. The goal of this article is the development of a simplified model of airflows inside a vehicle loaded with pallets, while assimilating them to those of an hydraulic network. The experiments have been performed on a reduced model to the scale 1:3.3 of a tractor-trailer. Moreover, numerical simulations of airflows are achieved on the software Fluent. Results of the simplified model present a good qualitative agreement with the applied and numerical data. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd and IIR.