Precision farming is one of the important areas to ensure food security by coping with climate change and increase farmer’s productivity. Plant factory is one of the aspects of precision farming and recently sought attention among modern farmers in Malaysia. While ensuring continuous supply of crops throughout the year with increased quality and yield, plant factories consume large amount of energy to maintain their micro-climatic condition. This paper presents the energy consumption profiling of a plant factory, owned by Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI) in Serdang, Malaysia. This study is important to establish the status quo of consumption pattern of the plant factory towards reducing the energy consumption. Hence, energy audit was carried at the plant factory for duration of 2 weeks. From the audit it was found that the energy was distributed as follows: Air conditioning system - 51%, LED - 36%, pump - 3% and others - 10%. Finally, suitable energy conservation measures were proposed to reduce the energy intensity of the plant factory.

No abstract

Solar chimney is very useful in terms of improving indoor thermal comfort. There are not many studies or simulation that have been done for a converging duct of solar chimney A CFD model of a solar chimney is simulated in this study using ANSYS Workbench 19.2 to find out the effect of convergent of the solar chimney to the velocity in the solar chimney and the air changes per hour in the developed numerical model. Solar chimney is mainly used in hot climate as a passive solar cooling system that can regulate the temperature and increases ventilation. The data needed to simulate the numerical model is taken from previous study. Using fluid flow (CFX) a 2D CFD steady state is simulated by 10 mm of thickness for the model. Four openings were set up to let air leave and enter the cabin. There were four configurations of bottomtop ratio were studied, 1:1, 1:0.8, 1:0.75 and 1:0.5. The 1:0.5 ratio gives the highest outlet velocity while the 1:1 ratio have the highest air changes per hour. Converging the solar chimney bring the solar chimney performance down.