Effect of Geometric Design on Airflow Simulation Inside the Storage Room for Paddy

Abstract

Stability of rice paddy organic content is essential for the production of high quality rice. For this reason it is important to design a proper storage room with sufficient ventilation and moisture removal capability. Airflow dynamics in terms of velocity profile were modelled through computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations in Fluent 6.3 program across the three different geometrical design of paddy storage room. The selection of turbulence model used in CFD is an important process due to the uncertainty of turbulence model in different operating scale. This research used a turbulence model and RNG k-ε model to calculate along the simulation of Discrete Ordinances (DO) type radiation and the heat flux was set to 800 W/m2. The results of this study have shown that Model C with pyramid-like roof demonstrated the optimum moisture removal through convection mechanism with the lowest average velocity of 0.175 m/s and the average temperature of 365.88 K. The CFD technique could be suitable for the simulation of airflow, permitting decrease in time and cost in the evaluation of airflow inside storage facility for paddy rice.