Investigation of heat and mass transfer characteristics in the ice rink: Ice making, maintaining and resurfacing processes

Abstract

Ice rink is a special kind of public building with high energy consumption and complex thermal and humid environment. The heat and mass transfer processes in the ice rink are quite important to achieve a better parameter controlling and energy saving performance. The complete physical processes of ice rinks include ice making, ice maintaining and ice resurfacing. The current research focuses on the characteristics of the complex processes in this special kind of building. A simulated model is built and validated to investigate the temperature and heat change of ice during the whole heat and mass transfer processes, taking the latent heat transfer into account. The results indicate that it takes about 5 h to complete one layer freezing when the layer thickness is 6 mm, which duration could change more than 1 h under different thermal parameters. The ice temperature could recover within 10 min during the ice resurfacing process, while it would cause an increase of refrigeration load from 136 W/m2 to 158W/m2. Meanwhile, the mass transfer process would result in over 10% of the total heat load at steady state. It would also cause 10–60 min difference for the ice freezing time at different air humidity ratios. The current analysis is beneficial for the design and operation for ice rinks.