Air infiltration into walk-in cold rooms through doors.

The air infiltration through doors into two walk-in cold rooms was measured for a range of door opening scenarios likely to occur in practice. Door air-tightness when closed was better than for larger forklift doors. Infiltration rates if the doors were only opened to 45° rather than 90° from the wall were not significantly different but if doors were only left ajar the rate was considerably lower; although still large compared with closed doors. Strip curtains provided an effective method to reduce air infiltration and their effectiveness was only slightly reduced by foot traffic through the door. If the predictions were adjusted by the door fractional open time, Gosney & Olama’s equation provided useful predictions of average air infiltration rates for personnel doors into walk-in cold rooms with a correction factor of between 0.4 and 0.6.