Experimental investigation of energy consumption and environmental impact of adaptive defrost in domestic refrigerators

摘要

With the development of human modern society at the turn of the new century, more and more people tend to use new technologies. To keep in tandem with modern technologies, food storage became easier with domestic refrigerators. In such systems, frost formation can be a fundamental problem especially in tropical countries with hot and humid ambient conditions. An adaptive method for defrosting the evaporator of a domestic refrigerator system is presented in this paper. In this method, parameters namely open door time, compressor ON time, previous defrost duration, mode of compressor, fans, and heater action before, during, and after defrost have been considered effective on defrost operation. Experiments have been carried out on two different case study top mounted freezers. Experimental results for case study 1 showed that the adaptive defrost in comparison to the fixed defrost cycles could reduce the energy consumption and Total Equivalent Warming Impact (TEWI) about 13% and 12.5%, respectively. The same parameters for case study 2 were decreased 5.5% and 5.2%, respectively. Furthermore, temperature variation of the compartments for both case studies decreased in comparison to that of their corresponding base case, which prevents quality loss of the stored food during defrost. Briefly, the results showed lower energy consumption, more environmentally friendly effects, and lower compartment temperature change. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.