PIV Analysis of the Flow Inside a Home Refrigerator and the Design of a Higher Efficiency Cooling Duct

PIV 계측을 이용한 가정용 냉장고의 냉기 유동특성 파악과 고효율 냉기 유로 설계

An experimental analysis of the flow inside the refrigeration compartment of a home refrigerator was conducted in order to achieve better performances in terms of uniform temperature distribution and cooling speed. 2D PIV and stereoscopic PIV were used for the experiments on an actual-size refrigerator at operating conditions. Two CCD cameras were employed for a wider field of view in the measurement of the shelf, and stereoscopic PIV was used to measure the three velocity components at the various cooling duct outlets and the mean velocity fields were area-integrated to calculate the flow-rates. 50 to 100 instantaneous velocity fields were time averaged for the mean velocity fields. With the result of this analysis, a new cooling duct system was developed, with the refrigerator's cooling performance increasing 11% in terms of cooling speed, and 25% in temperature uniformity.