Root-Zone Cooling in Tropical Greenhouse: a Review

Abstract

To prevent the decrease of vegetable production during the rainy season in a tropical region, it is important that cultivation is carried out in greenhouses. However, air temperature inside the greenhouse tends to be very high during the daytime in clear days. To overcome these problems, root zone cooling system has been developed as an energy efficient cooling system for tropical greenhouses. In this paper, performances of the root zone cooling system for tropical greenhouse are described. The application of the root zone cooling system for plant production in tropical greenhouses is still very potential to be developed. This is because the most significant temperature influencing plant growth of some plants was the root-zone temperature. It is important to evaluate the application of root zone cooling in tropical greenhouse for protected plant production in the tropics. It has been shown that CFD simulations analysis are able to visualize the temperature distribution in a tropical greenhouse equipped during root zone cooling. This has a positive potential for improving performance analysis, design, construction with more careful attention to environmental climate factors, type of screen, dimensions, arrangement of plant layout, and types of plants produced.