CFD simulation of temperature and airflow inside a shipping container size plant factory for optimal lettuce production

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.

CFD Simulation of the Airflow Distribution Inside Cube-Grow

“…On the solar dryer design, a study by Mohd Noh et al, [13] shows that CFD simulation was able to simulate and optimize the intermittent ventilation that able to dry the product faster with lower energy consumption. The previous study has proven the accuracy of CFD simulation and the potential to be the efficient methods to substitute physical experiments to analyze plant growth environmental condition and optimized growing structure design [14][15][16]. A study by Fan et al, [17] on the CFD simulation of the airflow uniformity in the plant factory shows that the measured value and the simulated value of air velocity were in a good agreement where the average relative error was only 15%.…”