Abstract
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have been playing an increasingly important role in designing the agriculture control environment structure in the past few years. Plant factory is a fully enclose control environment agriculture structure developed to create optimum growing conditions for the crops. Previous studies have proven that the CFD technique was able to analyse and predict the internal climate of the plant factory in the designing stage before the actual plant was built. This study was conducted to analyse the changes in airflow characteristics and temperature distribution in a shipping container size plant factory with different inlet and outlet locations. Uniformity of airflow and temperature distribution was important in plant factories as it is responsible to create optimum and uniform growing conditions for crops. The CFD model was validated by comparing simulation and experimental data of existing plant factory inlet and outlet location. The validation result shows an acceptable percentage error between simulated and measured data. Two alternative design of the inlet and outlet location was simulated to improve the uniformity of airflow and temperature distribution. The validated CFD model was then used to simulate the alternative design. Finally, the location of the inlet and the outlet that produce the most uniform airflow and temperature distribution inside the plant factory was identified.
Highlights
Malaysia is a tropical country with a maximum daily temperatures hover between the 32.2°C and 35°C range most of the time
As the maximum percentage error was below 10%, it can be concluded that the Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was able to represent the actual condition and can be used for further analysis
From the study it can be concluded that the CFD simulation able to represent actual conditions with acceptable accuracy
Summary
Malaysia is a tropical country with a maximum daily temperatures hover between the 32.2°C and 35°C range most of the time. This condition is not suitable for lettuce growing. A study by Kozai et al (2015) proved that the air movement plays an important role in aerodynamics at leaf surfaces. It affects the gas, heat and water exchange of plants and affects plant transpiration and photosynthetic rates. The study found that increasing airflow speeds in both vertical and horizontal directions from 0.01 to 0.30 ms-1 around crops can significantly enhance the plant transpiration and photosynthetic rates. Horizontal airflow speeds above 1.0 ms-1 were suggested to achieve the maximal plant transpiration and photosynthetic rates of the crop canopy
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