AN ANALYTICAL MODEL FOR PREDICTING INFILTRATION FLOW RATE THROUGH DOORWAYS OF COLD STORE

The number of cold stores is increasing rapidly in recent years, especially in China. Huge amount of energy is consumed by the refrigeration equipment of cold stores for its year round working. It is possible to optimize the design and operation processes to reduce the energy use by the accurate calculation of the heat load of the cold stores. The infiltration through doorways, which brings warm and moisture air into the refrigerated room, has great effect on the total heat load. Accurate prediction of it can help to calculate the heat load more precisely. This article establishes an analytical model for predicting the infiltration flow rate and validates this model against some experimental measurements from literatures. Other theoretical, empirical and analytical models are also compared with the proposed model. The results show that the proposed analytical model provides the closest comparison with the experimental measurements. The prediction error is less than +/- 8% in most cases.