An experimental and numerical study of refrigerator heat leakage at the gasket region

- Investigated the total effective heat leakage at the refrigerator's gasket in detail.
- Evaluated the effect of electric fan and hot loop pipe on the heat leakage.
- Analyzed system operation using integrated experimental and CFD data.

A combined experimental and computational approach was developed to measure the heat leakage through the refrigerator gasket region. The experiment was carried out by measuring the heat flux through the door gasket by Reverse Heat Load Method (RHLM). The experimental point measurements lie near to the continuous curve from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation, which makes it reasonable to provide a dimensionless shape profile by CFD to fill in the missing information between experimental measurement points in order to provide the actual effective heat leakage. The average effective heat leakage on the door gasket surface is determined as 0.2Wm−1K−1 comprising 17% and 14% heat leakage of the total load in the fresh-food and freezer compartments, respectively. The electric fan and the hot pipe along the perimeter of the door contribute to an increase of 20% and 10% in the effective heat leakage on the door surface of the freezer, respectively.