Study of Heat Transfer and Freezing Time-Temperature Behavior of Individual Pea Grains by Numerical and Experimental Methods

Abstract

Abstract The present research demonstrates an accurate and simple numerical model for heat transfer analysis within spherical peas when exposed to the cold air stream in a rectangular duct. The transient heat conduction equation (THCE) is solved for spherical shaped pea grains. A detailed numerical and experimental study of freezing time-temperature history for peas has been carried out. Thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity are measured experimentally. Temperature-dependent thermophysical properties are used in the transient temperature prediction of peas throughout the phase change process. Crank–Nicolson method has been used for the formulation of the numerical model. The effect of important parameters, viz., the initial temperature of peas, cooling air temperature, and cooling air velocity over pea samples has been studied both numerically as well as experimentally and it has been found that there is good agreement between numerical and experimental results. The correlation coefficient of linear regression, R2, between numerically predicted and experimental results, is found to be 0.987.