Optimizing Forced-Air Evaporative Cooling Chambers for Vegetable Preservation

Forced air evaporative cooling is an emerging approach to help with post-harvest fruit and vegetable storage and preservation. The rapid cooling of produce harvested has been shown to reduce food waste substantially making it a promising area for food waste reduction. This technology will be used by farmers who live in hot arid regions of the world with limited electricity access and would benefit from a cooling chamber that can run off minimal energy and will cool produce quickly. To advance understanding of the technology, a test chamber of the forced air evaporative cooler has been designed and built. This chamber will be used to test key design parameters to understand their impacts on the cooling performance and inform the design of full-scale chambers used to cool produce shortly after harvest. This thesis describes the rationale for the test chamber design as well as information on the application of the test chamber and the testing areas of interest.

Name thesis:degree_name

Bachelor

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Alvarez Perez, Gabriela

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Verploegen, Eric

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144633

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/144633