Experimental Investigation to Enhance the Performance of Freezer with Phase Change Material

The Nowadays utilization of cold storage devices increases in a wide variety of applications such as vaccines, medicines and food processing units, these devices consume a lot of power to operate. The power consumption of cold storage devices increases with lower coefficient of performance (COP) of the device. The present work gives the solution to enhance the performance of a commercial freezer by using phase change material (PCM) around the evaporator. PCM is a substance which absorbs or releases energy to produce useful cooling or heat at a phase transition. The conductive heat transfer rate from PCM to evaporator increased due to addition of PCM around the evaporator of the freezer, which improves the COP of the device. The freezer is also operating continuously for a few hours without power supply due to the energy stored in the PCM. An experimental setup of a commercial freezer with glycol solution used as a PCM was developed and experiment was conducted on the freezer with and without PCM. The test results show that the COP of freezer enhanced in between range of 40 and 80% by using of PCM.