Development of Lightweight Insulation Body for Refrigerated Vehicles by Using Composite Materials

摘要

Energy demand in refrigerated vehicles account for about 5% of fossil fuel consumption globally and this percentage is expected to rise as perishable raw food continue to enjoy significant patronage of refrigerated vehicles which provide low temperature condition for its sustenance. Sustaining the shelf life of fresh food remains a herculean task to most farmers as cold chain must remain unbroken in order to maintain the quality of fresh food. The concept of this research is to reduce energy consumption in refrigerated vehicles through lightweight insulated panel as this medium could effectively reduce the payload of the entire vehicle. Part of the progress made in this work, is to develop five different composite cover sheet for insulated panel using fibre loading and orientation as manufacturing parameters and results show that the oriented reinforced composite materials offer significant weight reduction compared to unoriented composite cover sheet. The panel weight of these new materials were estimated using all the conceptual parameters of a refrigerated vehicle and the results indicate that composite reinforced with 10%wt. of fibre at 30° orientation in the matrix, offers the best panel weight reduction with 5.2380kg/m~2 and 6.7380kg/m2 for 50mm and 100mm insulation thicknesses, respectively.