Comparison of Thermodynamic Performances Between Room Cooling and Forced-Air Cooling: Evaluation by Produce Temperature and Effects of Measurement Positions

EasyChair Preprint 3438

Abstract

Room cooling (RC) and forced-air cooling (FAC) are traditional precooling methods for postharvest horticultural products. The performances of these methods were widely investigated in terms of cooling time, energy consumption and related airflow and heat transfer characteristics. The authors recently proposed a thermodynamic model to evaluate the performances based on the experimental measurement of the produce temperature regarding the convective heat transfer between the air and products and related airflow strategies resulting in significant irreversible loss. Because of the temperature varying within a single bin and even within an individual produce, the performances indicated from this thermodynamic model are affected by the sampling positions of the produce temperature. In this study, based on the experiments with 30 bins of postharvest apples, such effects are respectively considered for the estimations of the volumetric mean temperature of an individual produce and the different temperature measurement positions within a single bin. The thermodynamic performances considering such effects are compared between RC and FAC. The results indicate that different temperature measurement positions result in higher differences of above 20-30% for the COPs and entropy generation ratio than that for other thermodynamic performances, while different methods to estimate the volumetric mean produce temperature generally resulted in limited effects on the thermodynamic performances.

Keyphrases: Postharvest Precooling, Thermodynamic performance, comparative study, temperature measurement

@booklet{EasyChair:3438,
  author    = {Guan-Bang Wang and Xin-Rong Zhang},
  title     = {Comparison of Thermodynamic Performances Between Room Cooling and Forced-Air Cooling: Evaluation by Produce Temperature and Effects of Measurement Positions},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 3438},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2020}}