Prediction of evaporation of defrosted water in refrigerator water trays

Abstract: The main concern of the present paper is to simulate the evaporation of defrosted water in domestic refrigerator water trays. The tray is assumed to be located above in vicinity to the compressor head, and part of the heat used to evaporate the water is heat from the compressor. The mathematical model is based on that of Bansal and Xie. In modeling, the basic physical equations are conservations of mass and energy. The model includes the various relevant parameters, e.g., the ambient air temperature, relative humidity of ambient air, initial temperature of defrosted water, area of water tray, initial mass of water in the tray, and characteristic length and area of the compressor shell. The experiments are done in two steps: finding of the correlations between the temperature of the compressor shell and the elapsed time and verifying the simulation results. The results show that the model simulates the experimental data fairly well. The model may be used as a tool to determine a suitable configuration for the evaporation of defrosted water collected in domestic refrigerator water trays. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]