• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.407-416
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• 2005

The kimchi refrigerator is the electric home appliance which is used for the maturing and preserving of the kimchi in domestic and foreign market. The kimchi refrigerator is composed in 3 main parts as insulation. kimchi container, machinery room. The heat exchanger of kimchi refrigerator is made of aluminum and the other parts are made of steel and polymer. Also, kimchi refrigerator is expensive and heavy as compared with same class of refrigerator until now. In the present study, the possibility to replace heat exchanger from aluminum to thermal conductive plastic was analyzed and experimented. The thermal conductive plastic has $10{\sim}100$ times heat conductivity than that of normal plastic. It is known that heat transfer process is dependent not only conduction but convection or radiation. Thermal conductivity of the applied material in this research is over than 2 W/mK, thermal conductivity doesn't play a vital role on heat transfer. In this study, temperature is the most important parameter on the kimchi refrigerator and the temperature of kimchi refrigerator's heat exchanger was measured and compared with the temperature calibrated by CFD analysis on the inside wall of the kimchi refrigerator. It is important to keep constantly the inside temperature of the Kimchi refrigerator. Besides numerical analyses for the new thermal conductive plastic for heat exchanger were executed with the various height of evaporation tube. A series of experiments were conducted to compare the performance of the two heat exchanger made of aluminum and thermal conductive plastic at the same condition and certified the possibility of the thermal conductive plastic. According to these results, it was confirmed that the conventional aluminium heat exchanger can be replaced by thermal conductive plastic successfully.

• Journal of Korean Society for Atmospheric Environment
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.59-67
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• 2014

In 1995 Kimchi refrigerator was developed at first, and has used HFC-134a as refrigerant. Kimchi refrigerator has been made 1,044,694 on the basis of 2010, disposed about 160,000 per year. Although mobile air conditioning, commercial refrigerator, general refrigerator is regarded as a major source of HFC-134a, little information is available for its emission characteristics of HFC-134a. This paper addresses the fugitive emission factors of Kimchi refrigerator at use-phase and disposal-phase. The residual quantities of Korean-made fifty three waste Kimchi refrigerators were weighed using a commercial recover of refrigerants to determine the emission factors at the disposal-phase. On the other hand, the emission factors at use-phase were estimated from the residual quantities and operating times. The average residual rate of forty three scarp Kimchi refrigerators is determined to be $74.6{\pm}5.2%$. The emission factor at the use-phase is estimated to be $3.5{\pm}0.8%/yr$ as a result of using average age of 11.7 years and the average residual rate determined here. The emission factor at the disposal-phase is determined to be 31.3% after adopting 58% of the recycling rate of refrigerant reported by Recycling Center. We estimate 3.1 g/yr for the average emission quantity of HFC-134a per operating refrigerator, while 22.5 g for that per waste Kimchi refrigerator. Since the chemical compositions of refrigerant of waste Kimchi refrigerator were the same as those of new refrigerant, it is expected that the HFC-134a recovered from waste Kimchi refrigerator can be reused for refrigerant.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.638-645
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• 2002

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the quality characteristics and consumer acceptance of the Kimchi affected by the storage method and the duration. The characteristics of Kimchi fermented and stored in the traditional method, such as cave facility or pit storage on the shore were compared to the Kimchi which was stored in the Kimchi refrigerator using the physicochemical and sensory evaluation. The quality of Kimchi stored by the Kimchi refrigerator was most acceptable with 3 month storage, while that of Kimchi stored by the storage facility under the ground on the shore was 1 month storage. Shelf life of Kimchi was extended up to 5 month stored by Kimchi refrigerator, and 3 month for the Kimchi stored under the ground on the shore.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.111.2-111
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• 2002

The temperature of Kimchi-refrigerator is controlled by the wishing condition the original taste of Kimchi, the fast precocity of Kimchi. In this paper we studied the controlling temperature of Kimchi-refrigerator. The controlling temperature of Kimchi refrigerator is based on microcontroller which control On/Off. In this paper, Fuzzy logic was used to control the temperature of Kimchi-refrigeration. I will apply to fuzzy logic control to have simple rule control on the place of On-Off control system in the past. This device controls the in order to measure several temperature of two refrigeration plant in Kimchi refrigerator solenoid valve in refrigeration plant. A solenoid valve...

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.1-7
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• 2020

In this paper, we describe fire risk of Kimchi refrigerator. The Kimchi refrigerator has been widely spread and used starting from the first half of 2000 and recently fire accidents caused by the Kimchi refrigerator emerged as social concern. In particular, in products of a specific manufacturer, it is not an environmental factor, but a characteristic that the fire is caused due to a defect of the product itself is shown. These features are judged to be formed by unique defects regardless of external factor by forming electrically arc mark in the relay element. In this paper, we analyzed the cause of the fire occurring in the Kimchi refrigerator and finally confirmed the characteristic that the fire occurred mainly in the relay element due to insufficient capacity of the relay element. Therefore, when a fire occurs in a product of the same maker as the Kimchi refrigerator mentioned in this paper, it is always judged that the inspection of the relay element should be carried out.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.113-120
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• 2007

Kimchi refrigerator is a specific refrigerator for Kimchi, Korean traditional fermented food. It has been fast popularized since it was developed about ten years ago. In this study, a survey was conducted with 103 female voluntary respondents to understand the customer satisfaction of the Kimchi refrigerator in the aspect of physical use. The respondents showed a high satisfaction for the use of refrigerators. It was, however, shown that they felt highly uncomfortable in using the refrigerator. In particular, the high discomfort was related to the fact that the customer should bend her torso very much to put Kimchi containers into the refrigerator, take them out of it, or clean its inside. Seventy-five percent of the respondents reported the experience of body-part pains and 58.4% of them reported pain experience in the back. It is presumed that these results are highly correlated to the top-cover design of the refrigerator, which is the most popular type to improve its performance of maintaining proper temperature. Therefore, the developers should consider these usability problems related to the refrigerator and try to enhance its usability by adopting ergonomics in the design stage.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.45-51
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• 2011

The kimchi refrigerator is the electronic home appliance which is used for the maturing and a custody of the kimchi. In this paper, performance improvement of fan and duct system for kimchi refrigerator has been studied by using a commercial CFD code. In order to achieve a improved fan performance, three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics and the Design of Experiments method have been applied. Additionally, to know the optimized duct inlet shape with the optimized fan, the overall performances were calculated with various duct inlet shapes. The final fan and duct system for kimchi refrigerator showed improved performance in efficiency and total head compared with the existing model.

• Journal of Power System Engineering
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.37-42
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• 2011

The normal cooling system of a refrigerator is applied to indirect a cooling methods. But the Kimchi refrigerator is applied to direct the cooling method. Recently when the model was applied to both direct and indirect the cooling methods, the improvement was considerable. With the development of the living standards in Korea, there has been more sensitive dissatisfaction about the taste and the smell of Kimchi. In order to solve these kinds, there is a need to systematic and scientific approach. Based on these, the purpose of this study is to optimize design for improve the storage period of Kimchi refrigerator. In this research, we concentrate on the temperature change and heat transfer characteristics of interior parts of the Kimchi refrigerator due to control cycle of temperature and flow phenomenon of cooling air.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.1078-1087
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• 2003

Kimchi refrigerator is a household electric appliance developed with the wholly domestic technology for maturing and keeping kimchi. However, the principle of keeping is not yet revealed obviously. This numerical study has been conducted to investigate the flow and heat transfer characteristics in a kimchi refrigerator. The effects of arrangement variation of a evaporation tube are examined. Also, the heat transfer characteristics through the insulation material are discussed in detail. The flow and temperature field was simulated using the commercial code of CFX-5.3. A natural convection flow is formed through about 5/6 region from the bottom within the keeping space and accordingly, the 90% region of kimchi containers satisfies the temperature requirement with 0$\pm$0.5$^{\circ}C$. The stagnant flow exists in the upper 1/6 region of the keeping space and accordingly, the stratified high temperature distributions appear in the upper region of kimchi containers. The upward shift of the start location of a evaporation tube improves the temperature concentration toward $0^{\circ}C$ but the pitch variation is of no effect. The heat fluxes on the insulation surfaces show two-dimensional distributions with being higher toward the center. Through the variation of insulation thickness, 3.5% saving of insulation material is obtained under the same heat transfer rate.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.22 no.12
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• pp.891-896
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• 2010

The objective of the present study is to reveal the effects of a phase-change material on the performance of a Kimchi refrigerator. Two-percent salt water, of which melting temperature was $-1.1^{\circ}C$, was used for the phase-change material. The salt water was packed in silicon cases and inserted between Kimchi container and the copper pipe of the evaporator. The maximum and minimum temperatures of the inner wall of the Kimchi container without salt-water pack were $-0.2^{\circ}C$ and $-8.9^{\circ}C$, which were remarkably improved by using the salt-water packs, resulting $-0.5^{\circ}C$ and$ -1.9^{\circ}C$. This shows a useful application of using phase-change materials for accurate temperature controls.