Design and analysis of a 20-feet modular cold storage system

Cold storage plays an essential role in the cold supply chain, especially for fishery products. Compact cold storage systems that can be easily moved across various locations are attractive for archipelagic regions. This study aims to design and analyze a 20-ft modular cold storage system. The design stages include the development of a geometrical model, calculation of cooling load, and selection of a refrigeration machine. The analysis of the designed cold storage system was performed using transient computational fluid dynamic simulations using Ansys Fluent. The compact 20-ft cold storage design consists of three main rooms: the anteroom, air blast freezer room, and freezer storage room. The calculation results showed a maximum cooling load of about 6.6 kW occurring in the air blast freezer room at noon. According to the temperature distribution from the transient computational fluid dynamic simulation, each room had different cooling characteristics, with the highest cooling rate of 94.59 W/h in the air blast freezer room, achieving a targeted temperature of −40 °C in 5 h.