Mathematical Models to Predict and Analyze the Energy Consumption of a Domestic Refrigerator for Different Position of the Shelves

Abstract

In this paper, a domestic refrigerator was tested to determine the power consumption for different positions of the shelves. The main contribution of this paper is the application of several strategies to analyze and model the power consumption of a domestic refrigerator when the fresh food shelves are changed of position. First, computer simulations were performed to analyze the power consumption using the moving average, the numerical derivative, and the Fourier transform. These simulations were used to study changes, periodic behaviors, minimum, maximum, and average values for the power consumption. Second, prediction methods were used to model the power consumption, these methods include cubic splines, the bilinear method, and artificial neural networks. With these methods, 2-D color graphs were built to predict the power consumption for any shelves positions. The validation results revealed that the cubic spline method provides the best results. Finally, it can be concluded that the models proposed in this paper provides new insights that can be used to design the internal compartments of the fresh food in order to try reducing the energy consumption.