Research on the Heat Exchanger for Kimchi Refrigerator Using Thermal Conductive Plastic

열전도성 플라스틱을 이용한 김치냉장고용 열교환기에 관한 연구

The kimchi refrigerator is the electric home appliance which is used for the maturing and preserving of the kimchi in domestic and foreign market. The kimchi refrigerator is composed in 3 main parts as insulation. kimchi container, machinery room. The heat exchanger of kimchi refrigerator is made of aluminum and the other parts are made of steel and polymer. Also, kimchi refrigerator is expensive and heavy as compared with same class of refrigerator until now. In the present study, the possibility to replace heat exchanger from aluminum to thermal conductive plastic was analyzed and experimented. The thermal conductive plastic has $10{\sim}100$ times heat conductivity than that of normal plastic. It is known that heat transfer process is dependent not only conduction but convection or radiation. Thermal conductivity of the applied material in this research is over than 2 W/mK, thermal conductivity doesn't play a vital role on heat transfer. In this study, temperature is the most important parameter on the kimchi refrigerator and the temperature of kimchi refrigerator's heat exchanger was measured and compared with the temperature calibrated by CFD analysis on the inside wall of the kimchi refrigerator. It is important to keep constantly the inside temperature of the Kimchi refrigerator. Besides numerical analyses for the new thermal conductive plastic for heat exchanger were executed with the various height of evaporation tube. A series of experiments were conducted to compare the performance of the two heat exchanger made of aluminum and thermal conductive plastic at the same condition and certified the possibility of the thermal conductive plastic. According to these results, it was confirmed that the conventional aluminium heat exchanger can be replaced by thermal conductive plastic successfully.