Conventionally, the geometry of the Fri-Jado open vertical refrigerated display cabinet design is optimized by drawing and producing the new components and testing the new configuration in a climate chamber, which is known to be an iterative process that consumes a large amount of time. To speed up the optimization process, the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was proposed. For this thesis, a case study was performed on a specific Fri-Jado cabinet that required many iterations for optimizing the geometry, using the commercial Simscale CFD package. In addition, experimental tests were performed on the Fri-Jado cabinet to compare with the simulation results.
During the experimental testing and literature review, it was found that the entrainment of ambient air was the main component of the heat load for the cabinet. By designing and validating a simplified 2D k-ω SST simulation of the air curtain and external environment, an optimization study was performed. In this optimization study, it was found that for an offset angle of 10° and throw angle of 25° in combination with a stepped velocity profile, minimal thermal and mass entrainment ratios were reached.