Range Door Design Through the Aid of Computational Heat Transfer

UL requires that cooking appliances meet temperature restriction requirements on the outside surfaces for consumer safety. Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics has revealed the relative importance of conduction, convection and radiation in the thermal management of a natural convection-cooled Range door design. After the initial verification of the door outer surface temperature predictions with experimental measurements, the computer model was used to evaluate design options. Results show that stuffing an air pocket with insulation in the upper part of the door will do very little to reduce the door outer surface temperature. Reducing emissivity of the door liner surface, baffle and trim inner surface reduces outer door temperature. Contrary to intuition, putting a thin trim insulation behind the outer door increases the door outer surface temperature. Opening up the convection channel, on the other hand, reduces the door surface temperature by a considerable amount. Use of numerical computations has also shown that a more economical fiberglass insulation is almost as good as an expensive micro-porous insulation in thermal management of the door design.