Turbulent force flow in an airblast storage room.

Forced air circulation in a storage room either with freezing/cooling or controlled atmosphere is usually turbulent because a high air change rate is generally required. The interaction between the turbulent air flow and the product layers plays an important role in the performance of the storage room. In this paper, a homogenous model based on the Brinkman-Forchheimer-extended Darcy equation for both fluid and porous layer is described, in association with the standard k-e turbulence model. Turbulent forced air circulation in a room containing porous layers is studied numerically by this model. A second order control volume technique is used for the discretisation of the governing equations. SIMPLEC is adopted for the treatment of the pressure-velocity coupling. The predicted results are compared with available experimental results in the literature. The effects of two different stored products on the flow field in the product layers are investigated, and useful information is provided for the optimised design of a storage room.