Abstract
•An experimental study was carried out on a refrigerator with PCM heat exchanger.•The power consumption of the novel refrigerator with PCM is found reduced by 12%.•Modeling (2D) and simulation was carried out for various cases of PCM emplacement.•The effect of the PCM emplacement on the temperature and air velocity is studied.•An optimal design is proposed by evaluating stabilization temperature.
An experimental investigation was carried out to improve the energy efficiency of a household refrigerator by integrating a Phase Change Material (PCM) to accumulate thermal energy and stabilize the temperature in the refrigerator compartment. A novel design of PCM heat exchanger is proposed in this investigation. The experimental results indicate that by integrating this novel PCM heat exchanger, power consumption is reduced by 12% and the COP is increased by 8% compared to the refrigerator without PCM. In order to identify the best performing designs among various cases of refrigerator compartments placed with PCM, 2D unsteady state CFD simulations were made. For all the cases, the household refrigerator was simulated to study the influence of the PCM emplacement on the temperature and velocity fields. The computational results indicate that using PCM emplacements on the evaporator, walls, and in the racks of the refrigerator compartments has a significant influence to stabilize and homogenize rapidly the temperature (86.66% improvement over the basic configuration). However, there is a limit beyond which increasing PCM coverage in the racks more than 75% does not lead to any significant improvements.