Increased consumer demand for fresh fruit throughout
the year has created a need for long term storage. Long
term storage of fruit uses more energy than fresh market
products, thus increasing production cost. Pacific
Northwest energy costs and more competition for markets
has made energy conservation an important factor to be
considered by the fruit industry. A BASICA computer
program, RLSIM, was developed to predict the transient
refrigeration load throughout the storage season in apple
and pear cold storage warehouses. RLSIM accurately
predicted the seasonal and component refrigeration system
energy demand curves during the 1985-1986 cold storage
season. The results also indicated that the largest single
energy use component is the continuous operation of
evaporator fans. Simulation of a six hours on and six hours off fan cycling technique indicated a reduction of 23.75 percent could be achieved in overall refrigeration
system energy use in the cold storage warehouse. Cold
storage warehouse management can be improved by using the
results of RLSIM. Fan cycling schemes could be properly
employed without risk of increasing fruit temperature.
Recommendations were made to update research in areas of
cooling and respiration rates of various fruits in both
controlled atmosphere and common storage. / Graduation date: 1988
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/26847 |
| Date | 31 July 1987 |
| Creators | Adre, Norberto |
| Contributors | Hellickson, Martin L. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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