Author : Mangesh S. Gavade, S. H. Barhatte and Murali Kandula

Cooking is an everyday activity and appliances for this purpose are expected to be user friendly and safe for user operations. One of the home appliances is a convection oven which operates on the electric resistance heater. The convection air currents within the oven cavity, distributes heat to the food stuff intended to be cooked in the oven. During self-cleaning operation the temperature within the oven cavity reaches a maximum of 450°C. Due to such a high temperature the oven door attends relative high temperatures by conduction and convection from the oven cavity. Oven door being a user interface to the oven cavity, it must be maintained at safe operating temperatures which can be achieved by cooling the oven door. At present, ambient air is forced through the oven door to cool the door to safe operating temperatures of 70°C. The paper discusses performance of venturi effects to increase the ambient air flow rate through the oven door. The parameters affecting the venturi effect performance are studied using CFD tools. The results show that the flow rate from the door region is a linearly proportional to the inlet velocity from the vent channel. Also the front frame opening affects the flow rate from the door region. The flow rate increases with the increase in front frame opening but at large openings reverse flow is observed which reduces the flow rate through door regions.

Keywords: Venturi Effect, Oven door cooling, CFD.