A correlation model of thermal entrainment factor for air curtain in a vertical open display cabinet

Thermal entrainment factor (TEF) is an important parameter to describe the cold preservation performance of a display cabinet. In order to calculate the TEF of a display cabinet rapidly and accurately, the method of establishing a correlation model based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation results is presented and the correlation model of TEF for typical single and double air curtain in a vertical open display cabinet is developed in this paper. The TEF of display cabinet predicted by the correlation model gives a maximum deviation of -9.4% and a mean deviation of -0.1% compared with the published experimental data. In addition, the correlation model can be used to calculate the air curtain return temperature, showing a maximum deviation of 0.9 degrees C and an average deviation of 0.1 degrees C compared with the published experimental data. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.