Applicability evaluation of innovative simplified methods of slatted floor in pig houses – A CFD study

Abstract

The slatted floor system is often used in pig housing. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a valuable technique for determining the airflow and gas dispersion within the pit headspace through the slatted floor. However, there is a practical issue related to modeling the thousands of small slot openings in real livestock buildings for CFD simulation. It is unpractical to simulate the slatted floor with geometry details due to the large mesh number and the limited computer capacity. In this study, several methods to simplify the model of the slatted floor were explored to reduce the computational cost. The study was based on CFD analysis supported by experimental validation. The slatted floor was modeled in four ways: direct geometry method (DGM), porous-region method (POM), and profiled-porous-region method (including PPOM-cell (PPOM-C) and PPOM-floor (PPOM-F)). To assess the feasibility of the simplification, the four modeling approaches were compared with the experimental data. The results showed that it’s feasible to model the slatted floor as POM or PPOM. The accuracy of POM was high, but it was greatly affected by the calculation of the resistance coefficient. PPOM-C has greatly reduced the amount of calculation, which could be used to simplify the large-scale pig house model whose flow fields and gas emissions below the slatted floor could be ignored. The simulation result of PPOM-F was the closest to DGM, however, due to the large number of meshes and complex setup, it was not suitable for practical simulation.