Thermal Analysis and Development of Ration Packaging for Efficient Heating withFlameless Electrochemical Heaters

摘要

The investigation has been conducted to study the transient thermal performanceof food-packages containing integral exothermic chemical heaters using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). The work was divided in two parts. The first part deals with the Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) packages, and the second part deals with the Self Heating Individual Meal Module (SHIMM). The MRE study was focused on developing tools to model the thermal characteristics of the heater and the MRE entree. Experiments were performed to obtain temperature profiles in the self heating ration packages under field like conditions. The FEA indicated that distributing the steam uniformly over the entire top surface of the package resulted inthe latent heat of vaporization ofthe steam being transferred to the food rapidly. By exploiting the condensation mechanism, the mass of the heater could be decreased by up to 50%. In the study on the SHIMM, a three dimensional thermal transient analysis was conducted. A number of experiments were also conducted on plain and modified heater geometries for the SHIMM. The FEA predictions agreed well with the experimental results.