Enhancing Energy Efficiency of a Dishwasher via Simulation Modeling

As the regulations and consumer preferences in Europe tend to favor more energy-efficient household appliances, companies have to find innovative ways of saving electric energy during the operations of those appliances. One such method in dishwasher design is to reduce heat energy loss to the surrounding environment and reuse heat energy during the washing cycle, thus minimizing the time that heaters are operating. In this study, a numerical simulation involving computational fluid dynamics is implemented to speed up the iterative process of improving efficiency. The washing cycle has been simplified to include only the most critical moments of dishwasher work, and non-important components have been excluded. A workflow of simulations and numerical methods employed for this task is presented. The numerical simulations are compared with real-life experiments to assess their accuracy and verify boundary conditions. Geometric and washing cycle improvements are compared with the base design and show satisfactory results.