CFD analyses for the development of an innovative latent thermal energy storage for food transportation

The transportation of perishable products is a crucial activity that must be carefully managed along the cold chain. The refrigerated transport aims at ensuring the suitable transportation conditions by maintaining the desired temperature level in the refrigerated compartment. Moreover, the carriage of perishable fresh foodstuffs calls for additional precautions due to the intrinsic metabolic activity of fresh foods which causes them to be highly temperature sensitive. About 30% of fresh products perishes on the route due to the loss of suitable temperature values. Recently, scientists have been focusing their efforts on the development of innovative solutions, which ensure a proper refrigerated products distribution and transportation in a more environmental-friendly and cost-effective way. Hence, in this work, a novel concept of a Latent Thermal Energy Storage (LTES) system consisting of an insulation layer of poly-urethane foam wrapping a second one of Phase Change Material (PCM) is proposed. In particular, the thermal performance is investigated by running numerical CFD analyses in Ansys Fluent. The effect of different product loads (25%-50%-75%) is studied. Besides, the contributions of the heat respiration and diverse food pre-cooling temperatures on the system performance are also analysed. For the long-distance route no door openings nor additional heat infiltrations are considered.