An investigation of a novel cooling system for chilled food display cabinets

Abstract

The modern retail cabinets that are used for chilling and displaying food in shops are described in this paper. The deficiencies of the purely convective heat transfer mechanism used to cool food in modern cabinets are highlighted. A novel heat transfer system that provides an integrated conductive/convective cooling mechanism is then proposed. A purpose-developed finite difference model and its application in the study of the novel cooling system are presented in this paper. The model was used to evaluate the performance of the mechanism compared with the conventional convective system. The results indicate that the proposed novel system can provide improved heat transfer, which contributes to lower core food temperatures of approximately 2.5−3.5 K. This can lead to significant reductions in energy and capital costs as well as improvements in food quality and shelf-life. Furthermore, the use of this cooling system could avoid the requirement for electric defrost, which is energy-intensive.