Refrigerated Display Unit

Abstract: In today’s competitive food marketing, new innovative ways of standing out in a crowd grows more important by every day. Smurfit Kappa Sweden AB, a leading manufacturer of cardboard, paper and packaging products desired to meet customer demands, displaying refrigerated products in the same manner as non-refrigerated products. The objective of the thesis work was to examine and develop a new kind of technology that combined compressor refrigeration and cardboard displays. The initial phase presented existing products of the concept and the focus was changed to finding solutions optimizing the power consumption. During the investigation of suitable compressor refrigerators, the technology of Peltier elements was found. The technology was investigated and found suitable for the project due to its outstanding qualities in low maintenance and long life expectancy. Due to a power consuming technology, the integration of the Peltier elements was to be made by developing a refrigerated module to be integrated in a cardboard display. The selection of technology was based on the results of the investigation and the concept generation conducted for both technologies. The concept chosen was an insulated Peltier refrigerated module with an acrylic glass lid. Further development of the concept was conducted and the main focus was to reduce power consumption and fulfill customer requirements. The final concept was prototyped and tested where results of the tests provided information that the display functioned as desired and fulfilled most of the measurable specifications, though requiring minor changes in design. The amount of energy required was found to be 0.31 kWh/day, about 9% of the target value, and production cost of the display of 1,084.3 SEK which is lower than the target value of 1,871 SEK.