Numerical prediction of the unsteady temperature distribution in a cooling cabinet

- An unsteady-state CFD numerical study of a cooling cabinet is presented.
- Three different models and three cases are studied.
- Temperature and velocity distributions are obtained.
- The CFD numerical results are validated against experimental data
- Both BA and PFTP models are good approaches to predict the unsteady temperature.

An unsteady state numerical study of a small cooling cabinet, using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), is presented in this work. Three different cooling levels are simulated until 3.5 h of operational time is reached. The prediction of the temperature and the velocity distributions of the air inside the cooling cabinet is obtained using three different models: a) the use of constant properties (CP), b) the approximation of all the properties fitted to temperature polynomials (PFTP) and c) the variation of the density with temperature according to the Boussinesq approximation (BA). The CFD numerical results were validated against experimental data. It was concluded that both PFTP and BA models are good approaches to predict the unsteady temperature inside the cooling cabinet.