A study on the heat transfer characteristics near the magnetic door gasket of a refrigerator

The present study has been carried out to predict the heat transfer characteristics near the door gasket of a residential refrigerator. Temperature measurement and numerical heat transfer analysis were conducted and compared to each other to achieve a more proper numerical analysis method. Three cases of numerical analysis were tried while changing the boundary conditions. The calculated result of temperature using a uniform free stream temperature showed a great difference from the measured temperature. The numerical result including two dimensional fluid flow was also shown to be far from the measured result. The measured temperature had periodic characteristics which were divided into two parts, an increasing part and a decreasing part during an 18 minute period because of the operation of compressor in a refrigerator. The heat transfer might contain three dimensional forced and natural convective heat transfer phenomena near the door gasket. Instead of adopting the complicated three dimensional numerical analysis the two dimensional heat transfer analysis with the measured free stream temperature derived more accurate temperature prediction than the other numerical analyses. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.