MACRo 2015- 5th International Conference on Recent Achievements in

Mechatronics, Automation, Computer Science and Robotics

Dynamic Models of a Home Refrigerator

Tamás SCHNÉ1,2, Szilárd JASKÓ1,2 , Gyula SIMON1
1 Departmentof Computer Science and Systems Technology, University of Pannonia,
8200 Veszprém, Egyetem út 10., Hungary, e-mail: [email protected],
[email protected], [email protected]
2 Kanizsa Felsőoktatásáért Alapítvány,

8800 Nagykanizsa, Zrínyi Miklós utca 33., Hungary

Manuscript received January 23, 2015, revised February 9, 2015.

Abstract: Home refrigerators produce a substantial part of the annual power

consumption in an average household. To further improve the efficiency of these
devices, new intelligent control solutions are required. These solutions necessitate the
behaviour modeling of the refrigerators.
We seek models with as simple structure as possible, since future intelligent
controllers may use such models in real time, thus their evaluation must be feasible even
on simple microcontrollers. We investigate various dynamic models to describe the
behavior of the refrigerator, i.e. the cool-down and warm-up phases.
For model parameter identification real data was collected from a real home
refrigerator. Data processing, modeling and the parameter identification were performed
in MATLAB environment.

Keywords: refrigerator modeling, data measurement, identification, simulation

1. Introduction
Domestic refrigerators are widely investigated in the literature. Some
publications deal with the energy consumption mainly from economical point of
view. Hermes and Melo [1] and Marz [2] found that refrigerators require 11%-
16% of the whole energy consumption of a home. This high rate has to be
decreased thus different works try to develop mathematical models that can be
efficiently used for refrigerator design in the future.
They usually concentrate on the four main elements of a refrigerator: the
cabinet [3], [4], [5], evaporator [6], [7], [8], condenser [9], [10] and compressor
[11], [12]. A common property of these models is that they describe exactly the
investigated systems but use too complicated models that cannot be efficiently

103 10.1515/macro-2015-0010

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used in microcontrollers. Thus our purpose is to develop a model applicable for

intelligent control, using low-end devices.
The structure of the paper is the following: In Section 2 the applied system
modeling and evaluation method is defined. Section 3 contains three system
models with increasing complexity, Section 4 concludes the paper.

2. Methods
The purpose of the modeling is to create a linear, discrete, parametric model
of the refrigerator, which can be used for intelligent control of future
refrigerators. The model must represent the operation of the refrigerator with
enough precision to allow intelligent control, but it does not need to model
every little detail of the operation. Note that there exist detailed and precise
models [3], [6], [9], [11], but these are too complex to evaluate in small
controllers, and the precision they provide is not required.
Our modeling concept was to create as simple models as possible, thus we
tried to locate those components of a refrigerator that had to be necessarily
modeled. We applied incremental modeling with increasing model complexity
(i.e. increasing model order).
The created models are physical models of the refrigerator, they were
created by analyzing the operation of the refrigerator and selecting essential
components to be used in the model. The models were built in
MATLAB/Simulink, and the parameters of the models were identified using
MATLAB.
For model identification real measurement data were used: a refrigerator was
operated in various conditions to collect data.
In Fig. 1 measured data can be seen. On the left hand side there is the cool-
down phase of the refrigerator while the warm-up is on the right. They show the
whole processes from room temperature to the lowest possible temperature and
back.
Note that the real measurements contain sudden jumps below zero degrees.
The background of this effect is that there is a security valve in the refrigerator
that saves the compressor from over charging. This is one of those features
which is not necessary to model.

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 Dynamic models of a home refrigerator 105

Figure 1: Measured data of the refrigerator cool-down (left) and warm-up (right)
phase. Thick line - back wall, thin line - cabinet air.

For parameter estimation and model evaluation a quadratic error function

was used:
n

e = ∑(s(i) − y(i))² (1)

i=1

where n is the size of the measurement record, and s and y contain the
simulated and the measured back wall data, respectively. The possible
simulated models, resulting s will be discussed in Section 3.
The parameter estimation was performed by minimizing e, using the
"fminunc" function of MATLAB.

3. Models
We will introduce three models with increasing complexity in this section.

A. Modeling the cabinet air temperature

For the first model we chose one main parameter (Tc - cabinet temperature)
that was thought to be appropriate to characterize the system behavior and to be
good for control. This temperature is increased by the ambient temperature
(Ta≥0°C) and decreased by the inlet temperature of the refrigerant of the
evaporator (Te<0°C). Heat transfers are bounded by the thermal resistance of
the insulation (Ri) and the thermal resistance of the wall between the cabinet and
the evaporator (Rec). The performance of a refrigerator is also influenced by the
cabinet load, i.e. its heat storage capacity (Cc).

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The relationship of these parameters is illustrated in the electric circuit

shown in Fig. 2. Temperatures, thermal resistances, heat flows and heat storage
capacities can be treated as voltages, electric resistances, currents and capacitors
(storages) respectively.

Figure 2: Refrigerator model with one storage element.

If one considers the behavior of a refrigerator then can find that it shows
hybrid functionality. It has two discrete states: 1 - compressor off,
2 - compressor on. In each state the system can be described with linear
inhomogeneous ordinary differential equations with constant coefficients. State
changing is represented with a binary switch (sw) in the circuit, from which the
equations for the warm-up (Eq. (2)) and the cool-down (Eq. (3)) phases can be
derived:
𝑇 (𝑡) 𝑇 (𝑡)
𝑇𝑐̇ (𝑡) = − 𝐶𝑐 𝑅 + 𝐶𝑎 𝑅 (2)
𝑐 𝑖 𝑐 𝑖
and
𝑇𝑐 (𝑡) 𝑇 (𝑡) 𝑇𝑒 (𝑡)
𝑇𝑐̇ (𝑡) = − 𝐶 (𝑅 ×𝑅 )
+ 𝐶𝑎 𝑅 + 𝐶𝑐 𝑅𝑒𝑐
(3)
𝑐 𝑖 𝑒𝑐 𝑐 𝑖

Identification results We simulated the system behavior in the two phases

and compared the results to the measured data. Both phases show good match
(Fig. 3). Note the modeling error below zero, and also note that the trend is
adequately modeled.

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 Dynamic models of a home refrigerator 107

Figure 3: The cool-down and warm-up phases of the one storage model compared to
measured data.

We can conclude that a single differential equation is enough to describe the

behaviour of the inner air of the cabinet. However, the one storage model is not
appropriate for control design because it does not model the temperature of the
back of the cabinet, a widely used control parameter.

B. Modeling the air and evaporator

A classical refrigerator control is based on the temperature of the back of the
cabinet, which is influenced by the evaporator. The background of this strategy
is that impulse-like door openings affect the least in this area. The walls and
stored food have a common heat storage capacity, which is great enough to
keep the refrigerator compressor from unnecessary operation. Moreover, warm
air streaming in cools down quite fast, thus it cannot influence the system
temperature considerably.
The back of the cabinet, with the evaporator is modeled by a capacitance Ce
capacity with temperature Te. The capacitance is charged by the condenser
(Tcond) via the capillary tubes (Rcap) as shown in Fig. 4. The binary switch sw has
the same role as in Section A. The warm-up and cool-down phases are described
by the following equations:
Warm-up (sw off):
𝑇 (𝑡)−𝑇𝑐 (𝑡) 𝑇 (𝑡)−𝑇𝑐(𝑡)
𝑇𝑐̇ (𝑡) = 𝑒 + 𝑎 (4)
𝐶𝑐 𝑅𝑒𝑐 𝐶𝑐 𝑅𝑖
𝑇 (𝑡)−𝑇 (𝑡)
𝑇𝑒̇ (𝑡) = 𝑐 𝐶 𝑅 𝑒
𝑒 𝑒𝑐
Cool-down (sw on):
𝑇 (𝑡)−𝑇 (𝑡) 𝑇 (𝑡)−𝑇 (𝑡)
𝑇𝑐̇ (𝑡) = 𝑒 𝐶 𝑅 𝑐 + 𝑎 𝐶 𝑅 𝑐 (5)
𝑐 𝑒𝑐 𝑐 𝑖
𝑇𝑐 (𝑡)−𝑇𝑒 (𝑡) 𝑇𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑 (𝑡)+𝑇𝑒 (𝑡)
𝑇𝑒̇ (𝑡) = 𝐶𝑒 𝑅𝑒𝑐
− 𝐶𝑒 𝑅𝑐𝑎𝑝

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Figure 4: Refrigerator model with two storage elements.

Identification results The system parameters were identified and the warm-
up and cool-down phases were simulated, as shown in Fig. 5. While the warm-
up phase is modeled correctly, there is significant error in the cool-down phase.
This modeling error is corrected by the three storage model introduced in
Section C.

Figure 5: The cool-down and warm-up phases of the two storage model.

C. Complex model: air, evaporator, condenser and compressor

The fault of the two storage model was that it did not handle the heat storage
capacity of the refrigerant container circuit. A significant amount of material
can be found in the condenser and the compressor, thus we get a more precise
model if the constant voltage source Tcond is exchanged with a condenser having
Ccond capacity and Tcond voltage. The compressor supplies refrigerant Tcomp to the
condenser through a narrow tube Rcond. The electric circuit representing the
relationship between the model elements is depicted in Fig. 6.

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 Dynamic models of a home refrigerator 109

The warm-up phase of this model is described with Eq. (4), because the new
elements influence only the cool-down equations, as follows:

𝑇 (𝑡)−𝑇𝑐 (𝑡) 𝑇 (𝑡)−𝑇𝑐(𝑡)

𝑇𝑐̇ (𝑡) = 𝑒 + 𝑎
𝐶𝑐 𝑅𝑒𝑐 𝐶𝑐 𝑅𝑖
𝑇 (𝑡)−𝑇 (𝑡) 𝑇 (𝑡)+𝑇𝑒 (𝑡)
𝑇𝑒̇ (𝑡) = 𝑐 𝐶 𝑅 𝑒 − 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑
𝐶 𝑅
(6)
𝑒 𝑒𝑐 𝑒 𝑐𝑎𝑝
𝑇 (𝑡)−𝑇𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑 (𝑡) 𝑇 (𝑡)+𝑇𝑒 (𝑡)
𝑇̇𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑 (𝑡) = 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝
𝐶 𝑅
− 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑
𝐶 𝑅
𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑎𝑝

Figure 6: Refrigerator model with three storage elements.

Identification results The behavior of the identified and simulated system is

shown in Fig. 7. In this case both the cool-down and warm-up phases are
satisfactorily modeled. The final parameter values can be found in Table 1.

Figure 7: The cool-down phase of the three storage model. Solid lines - measured
data, dashed lines - simulated data.

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110 T. Schné, Sz. Jaskó, Gy. Simon

Table 1: Model parameters and values.

Ri Rec Rcap Rcond Cc Ce Ccond Ta Tcomp

0.475 0.325 0.01 0.099 3.2 0.64 0.6 20 25

Figure 8: A 37 hour long simulation.

We made a long time simulation that took 37 hours and 44 minutes. The result
is depicted in Fig. 8. It can be seen that the model follows the real behavior of
the refrigerator with small error.

3. Conclusion
Three dynamic models of a domestic refrigerator were investigated in this
paper. The simplest one describes the system with a single linear
inhomogeneous ordinary differential equation with constant coefficients. This
model captures the inside air temperature of the refrigerator correctly, but the
back of the cabinet (which is important for the control) is not included in the
model.
The second model improves the first one. Here two equations are defined for
both phases. One describes the behavior of the cabinet air and an other one is
for the evaporator. This model has significant modeling error in the cool-down
phase.

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 Dynamic models of a home refrigerator 111

The most exact model is the third one, containing three capacitances. It
applies two differential equations to describe the warm-up phase and three
equations when the compressor is on. It is based on the second model but the
cool-down phase is extended with an equation for the condenser of the
refrigerator, and models the refrigerator with enough precision to be used in
intelligent control applications.

Acknowledgements
This publication/research has been supported by the European Union and
Hungary and co-financed by the European Social Fund through the project
TÁMOP-4.2.2.C-11/1/KONV-2012-0004 - National Research Center for
Development and Market Introduction of Advanced Information and
Communication Technologies and TÁMOP-4.2.2.A-11/1/KONV-2012-0072
project.

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