The transportation of perishable products is a crucial activity that must be carefully managed along the cold chain. The refrigerated transport aims at ensuring the suitable transportation conditions by maintaining the desired temperature level in the refrigerated compartment. Moreover, the carriage of perishable fresh foodstuffs calls for additional precautions due to the intrinsic metabolic activity of fresh foods which causes them to be highly temperature sensitive. About 30% of fresh products perishes on the route due to the loss of suitable temperature values. Recently, scientists have been focusing their efforts on the development of innovative solutions, which ensure a proper refrigerated products distribution and transportation in a more environmental-friendly and cost-effective way. Hence, in this work, a novel concept of a Latent Thermal Energy Storage (LTES) system consisting of an insulation layer of poly-urethane foam wrapping a second one of Phase Change Material (PCM) is proposed. In particular, the thermal performance is investigated by running numerical CFD analyses in Ansys Fluent. The effect of different product loads (25%-50%-75%) is studied. Besides, the contributions of the heat respiration and diverse food pre-cooling temperatures on the system performance are also analysed. For the long-distance route no door openings nor additional heat infiltrations are considered.

Foodstuff has to be transported from where it is produced or packaged to the market. It is important to control the temperature and humidity of the delivered food to minimize the waste and ensure customer satisfaction. At the same time, unfortunately, the transport sector is among the polluting sectors. Therefore, innovative solutions have been proposed such as the adoption of Latent Thermal Energy Storage (LTES) systems based on Phase Change Materials (PCMs) to control the food temperature. Such systems minimize the fuel consumption and thereby reduce the emission. LTES systems rely on the phase change process to absorb and store heat in a more sustainable way while ensuring a nearly constant temperature for the foodstuff while being transported. Hence, we first present a general overview of the application of PCMs at low temperatures. Then, the literature on the adoption of PCMs in the refrigerated transport sector is critically surveyed. Different proposals offered in the literature are recovered, compared, and critically assessed based on their merits. Despite the differences between the proposed technologies, significant advantages in terms of temperature uniformity in the refrigerated space, product thermal stress reduction, product quality, energy consumption, and pollutant emissions reduction are reported in the literature as surveyed in this paper.