Abstract: Air fryer is a popular product favored by young customers in recent years. Compared to traditional frying cooking methods, air fryer use high-temperature air as the cooking medium to heat ingredients, which has the advantages of low fat, light oil, and health. However, at the same time, air fryer have pain points such as poor cooking uniformity, requiring users to flip the ingredients during use, which affects the user experience. Therefore, it is significant to study the cooking performance of air fryer. Builds a CFD model that simulates flow filed in the air fryer under load condition. Through experiments and simulations, this research digs into the heating mechanism, analyses flow pattern of high temperature air flow in the air fryer and ultimately explains the reason of poor heating uniformity. Results show high consistency between simulation results and experimental results. Results also points out that heating uniformity is highly related to the air speed at the surface of the food and changing the flow pattern can highly improve the heating uniformity.

Key words: Air fryer, Air duct design, CFD