Review of development of phase change cold storage technology for food cold chain application

This paper reviews the recent development of phase change cold storage technology for food cold chain application. According to the application field of cold chain, developments of phase change cold storage technology in cold storage and low temperature transport are introduced separately, such as hold-over plate refrigerated storage, hold-over plate refrigerated vehicle, cold storage type transport incubators. Numerical simulations using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS FLUENT to characterize the temperature distribution in cold storage plate and hold-over plate refrigerated vehicle in charging process is reported. The results indicate that the charging capacity increase with the heat transfer fluid flow rate increase when the inlet temperature remains constant. Application of phase change cold storage technology in field of refrigeration transportation equipment has huge development prospect.