Numerical Study and Optimization of Air Flow and Thermal Behavior Inside a Typical Cold Room Loaded With Agricultural Produce Available to Purchase

This work is part of a research activity aiming to improve and optimize air flow and temperature distribution inside a refrigerated cold room. An improved flexible air duct design inside the cold room is studied for uniform air flow and minimum temperature gradient inside the cold room. The present study investigates on various flexible air duct designs inside the cold room to provide better thermal management to improve the shelf life of the produce. In this study, the most commonly used refrigerated cold room is considered with inlet and outlet sections placed in the front wall of the room. The numerical modeling of airflow was performed using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code Fluent and turbulence modeling with standard k–ε model.