CFD Simulation on an Improvised Ice Cream Container

A temperature-sensitive product such as ice-cream may cause the industry to face several challenges throughout the production, storage, packaging, and distribution processes. With the purpose to improve the performance of an ice cream container that acts as cold storage during the delivery process, the integration of a tube-type phase change material (PCM) thermal storage system was studied. In this work, a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) method was used to model and analysed eight designs of phase change thermal storage systems incorporated within the ice-cream container. The tube type PCM was modeled, with and without the conducting pins, aiming to maximise the heat exchange within the system. To obtain a proper design, parametric studies on the number of pins and its diameter were further analysed. For all simulations, the initial time for freezing simulation was set to 2℃, assuming the PCM was fully in a liquid state with the ice mass fraction was set to 0. With that, the PCM average temperature and the total mass fraction was observed and analysed. From the results, the ice mass fraction percentage of the systems was observed to increase with the increasing number of pins. Model with (the maximum) 40 pins has improved ice mass fraction for at least 67.58% when compared to the configuration without pin. Also, the average temperature of PCM for model with maximum pins, was observed to be 37.14% lower when compared to the configuration without pins and less pin numbers. Nevertheless, although the presence of pins has proven to enhance the heat exchange within the system, the percentage of ice formation was considered to be low and the average temperature was still as high as 0.66℃ after 12 hrs of freezing process. This indicating that a proper design of TES is inevitably needed, in order to maximise both heat exchanges and PCM storage ability within the system. © 2023, Semarak Ilmu Publishing. All rights reserved.