Thermo-economic assessment of hybrid renewable energy based cooling system for food preservation in hilly terrain

In the commercial food sector, preservation and transportation is responsible to avoid the 22% spoilage of the total food production in developing countries like India. To reduce the spoilage, preservation of such produce including milk is needed in remote places. Due to the increased fossil fuel costs, issues in grid extension and environmental concerns, there has been a renewed interest in hybrid renewable energy systems for cooling applications in remote/rural areas. In this paper, the overall thermal performance and economic aspects of a hybrid energy based milk cooling system for hilly terrain have been analysed using the MATLAB software and the appropriate hybrid energy systems has been predicted. The results indicate that the biomass and gobar gas combination can show the overall thermal performance as 0.17-0.23 with lowest Payback period and life cycle cost of 4.5 years and INR 2.8 × 107 respectively. The sensitivity analysis shows that the maximum influence of uncertainty in input parameters on the overall COP, capital cost, running cost and payback period are 6.8, 5.1, 5.3 and 6.1 percentages respectively.