Summary

In this work a computer program to simulate the thermodynamic performance of a specific household refrigerator, running both in steady-state and in cycling transient conditions, was developed. The computer program was developed based on the fundamentals principles of mass, energy and momentum conservation. Empirical parameters derived from experiments were included in the equations to reduce the model complexity and also to improve its performance. The refrigeration system was modeled in steady-state conditions while the cabinet was modeled following a transient approach. The entire model is therefore of a quasitransient nature. The refrigeration system model was adapted from a literature existing approach. Now, the cabinet model had the function to estimate the thermal load, the airflow and thermal capacitance with good accuracy. Through the comparisons carried out by the author it was shown that such a strategy is able to reproduce the energy consumption experimental data within an error band of ± 10%. Although the empirical parameters were modeled in specific way for the object of study, the model was also used to study the impact of some design parameters on the system performance. Finally, the proposed sensibility analysis showed that by changing some design parameters the refrigerator energy consumption can be reduced by 18.7%.

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