2-DIMENSIONAL SIMULATION OF THE AIR-FLOW IN 2 INDUSTRIAL MEAT CHILLERS

The application of a commercial CFD code to simulate airflow circulation in chillers in the meat industry is discussed in this paper. The sensitivity of calculations to meshes and to four boundary conditions of the air inflow has been investigated. This study reveals the limits of uniform meshes, which must only be used to bring to light the major trends of the flow. The non-uniform mesh is the best compromise between the accuracy of the results and the computation time. Moreover, this study demonstrates that only one part of the two chillers considered is sensitive to the conditions of the air inflow; that cml lead in some cases to a great simplification in the calculations. The validation of the 2D numerical models has been perform med by a comparison of the calculated results with the measurements of both airflow direction and velocity carried out in two industrial chillers . In a qualitative point of view, the flow structure observed in the two installations is well calculated. The relative error on the calculated air velocities is about 25%. This accuracy is good enough to identify deficiencies of ventilation, because the range of variation of velocities inside one chiller is important (0.1-5.0 ms(-1)).