Paper Conference

Proceedings of BSO Conference 2022: 6th Conference of IBPSA-England

     

Simulating the built environment for another globally distributed species

Derek Mitchell
University of Leeds

Abstract: Simulating the built environment for a globally distributed and diverse species e.g. to cope with climate change, has particular challenges. These are explored here using honey bees (Apis Mellifera L), a vital pollinator of food crops worldwide, consisting of 24 subspecies that maintain close temperature and humidity control in a self-constructed or partly human constructed built environment. Honey bee thermofluid characteristics and their requirements of the structure are largely unknown. To address this an open source i.e. FreeCAD (Riegel and Mayer, 2019) and OpenFOAM (Jasak, Jemcov and Tukovic, 2007), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) conjugate heat model was developed. Results from the model demonstrate the power of CFD in investigating the interactions with their built environment of another species by showing significant variation in convection flow with different honey bee sub-species in differing distributions within the nest.
Keywords: Apis mellifera, validated model, performance data, occupancy modelling and assumptions
Paper:
bso2022_40