International Journal of Recent advances in Mechanical Engineering (IJMECH) Vol.3, No.1, February 2014 43               Md. Imran Hossen Khan 1 and Hasan M.M. Afroz 2 1,2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Dhaka University of Engineering & Technology, Gazipur, Bangladesh ABSTRACT This work shows the effect phase change material (PCM) on temperature fluctuation inside the evaporator cabinet of a household refrigerator. The experiment has been done at different thermal loads with two different PCMs (Water and Eutectic solution (90% H 2 O + 10% NaCl) of melting point 0°C and -5°C respectively). The PCM is placed around the five sides of the evaporator cabinet in which the evaporator coil is immersed. The experimental results with PCM confirm the notable reduction of the fluctuation of the cabin temperature at lower load but at higher load this effect is not so significant. Between two PCM, the reduction of temperature fluctuation for Eutectic solution is better than water PCM. This reduction of temperature fluctuation ultimately improves the food preservation quality of the refrigerator. KEYWORDS Food preservation, Household refrigerator, Phase change Material, Temperature fluctuation, Cabinet 1. INTRODUCTION Household refrigerator or cold storage is playing an important role for preserving our daily food and it is better than most of other preservation methods. But the most important problem in this process is to exposure higher temperatures and/or fluctuations of storage temperature produces cumulative adverse effects on the quality of stored foods, which is the primary cause of damage to food marketed through retail channels [1]. In the conventional household refrigerator the compressor works in on-off mode. The refrigerant of the evaporator coil takes the cabinet heat during compressor on mode. During the off mode of the compressor, the temperature inside the evaporator cabinet starts rising due to heat released by the food and also due to ambient conditions. This on and off makes a temperature fluctuation (temperature rapidly rise and drop) inside the evaporator cabinet which ultimately decrease the quality of the food. The physical and chemical changes caused the loss of quality of the product. Due to temperature fluctuation occurred during the storage period of frozen vegetables and fruits, which changes the physical structure of that food which ultimately affect the quality are a result of re crystallization and sublimation phenomena, related to the stability of the ice crystals inside and on the surface of the products. Temperature fluctuations during freezing are prior responsible of that re- crystallization and surface drying, although the importance of these physical changes decreases at lower storage temperatures [2] [3][4]. Flores and Goff [5] found that the size of ice crystals was larger in samples stored under fluctuating conditions compared to storage at a constant temperature. Donhowe and Hartel [6] studied the ice re-crystallization during bulk storage of ice cream in containers. They controlled the freezer temperature with ±1.0 ºC fluctuation and without