Paper Conference

Proceedings of eSim 2022: 12th Conference of IBPSA-Canada

     

Computational fluid dynamics modelling of the indoor environment of a small-scale high-density controlled environment agriculture (CEA-HD) space

Gilbert Larochelle Martin, Danielle Monfet
École de technologie supérieure, Canada

Abstract: This paper investigates the modelling of the indoor environment of a small-scale high-density controlled environment agriculture (CEA-HD) space with user defined functions (UDFs) specified in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) commercial software. The indoor airflow velocity, temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide fields were computed for a two-dimensional model of a CEA-HD space where the crops being grown were represented as porous media. The model showed consistent results with grid size and was used to assess the distribution of the different computed fields. Furthermore, a parametric analysis investigated the influence of inlet velocity on the predicted production space homogeneity, quantified using the coefficient of variation of the computed fields. The model identified possible problematic locations in the production space and identified an inlet configuration yielding a coefficient of variation of 44.2 % over the velocity field. The developed model, once validated, will support the development of enhanced designs and load calculation approaches for CEA-HD spaces.
Keywords: CFD, CEA, distributed environment
Paper:
esim2022_213