Experimental Study on Direct Contact Melting Heat Transfer of Frozen Product

Direct contact melting heat transfer of frozen product has been studied. Frozen meat is used as a working object in this experiment and metal plate is used as a melting apparatus. The experiment was carried out in room temperature where the frozen meat was brought into contact directly to upper plate surface while the lower side of the plate is in contact with the ambient air. In order to enhance melting process the upper surface of the plate is grooved to drain the water coming from melting ice. Contact surface area, the grooves width and the dept of grooves were varied in this experiment to the influence of those parameters and to obtain optimum geometric configuration, which give the faster melting time. Experimental research show that surface configuration of C123 (concentric grooved, 6 mm grooves depth, 5 mm grooves width and 10 mm surface contact) resulted improvement the rate of melting about 45 % or have correlation equal to 1,44 for 100-minute initial melting than flat plate one. The rate of melting would be more improve with addition of inclination of groove drain. The rate of frozen meat melting by grooved plate was faster than of flat plate on experiment of 100x100 mm2, weights 150 grams and required 15 minutes. At geometry A (unidirectional grooved) a correlation is obtained:


This equation explains correlation between the rates of melting to variation of, the dept of grooves (a), wide of groove (b) and wide of contact surface (c) variable compared to that of flat plate.