Summary

As the issues related to the energy efficiency and usab ility of the household refrigerators have become very important environmental and market requirements, the detailed knowledge of the heat and mass transfer mechanisms which drive the thermal performance of the product emerged as a mandatory condition to achieve the new standards and regulations. In this way, this t hesis has as the main objective to study and model the thermal behavior of a refrigerat or submitted to door opening and closing, in order to quantify the increment on sensible and latent heat regarding this event as well as to develop a methodology to be employed on the design of the refrigerators. A mathematical model was developed and implemented in a computer program where the system of equations was solved by applying the Newton-Raphson method in order to obtain the transient response of the thermodynamic variables related to the problem. Experiments were carried out to validate the proposed mathematical model and the comparison between numerical and experimental results presented good agreement. [...]

Material for download