Performance Analysis of Wind Tower Greenhouse Integration Using CFD

The rapid economic development and  growth in population have increased fossil fuel utilization of to meet the increased energy demands. This led to significant increase in pollutant emissions in the atmosphere  in the last few decades. The carbon dioxide has crossed the level of 400 ppm in the atmosphere.  Thus, efforts are being made to optimize the energy utilization in various sectors including the greenhouse sector. There is huge potential to optimize energy utilization in greenhouses by implementing novel techniques. Minimizing input energy requirements is one of the methods to enhance the performance of greenhouse systems. Air temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation and vapour pressure deficit are important variables in a greenhouse system. The temperature inside the greenhouse is required to be maintained between 17 °C and 27 °C. As far as relative humidity is concerned, its desired values lie between 60% to 90%. However, the relative humidity can be significantly less than 60% in hot and arid climates. The important parameter which quantifies transpiration is known as vapour pressure deficit. Wind towers have the potential to improve the performance of greenhouse systems. Previously, wind towers have been widely applied in building sectors. There are a number of studies which report the application of wind towers for thermal comfort in buildings such as the studies of Montazeri and Azizian, 2008; Calautit et al., 2013; Hughes and Cheuk-Ming, 2011; and Sadeghi et al., 2020. The evaporative cooling in greenhouse systems has also been implemented as reported by López et al., 2012; Villarreal-Guerrero et al., 2012; Bell et al., 2015 and Ghosh and Ganguly, 2017. The evaporative cooling in greenhouse systems is the widely used methods to control temperature, relative humidity and other parameters inside the greenhouse. On the other hand, windcatchers have been applied in building sectors to control the temperature and relative humidity. Thus, their integration seemed to have strong potential for the technological developments in the area of greenhouse systems. Limited research work is available in the literature on wind tower greenhouse integration. Therefore, the current study analyzes the utilization of evaporative cooling for controlling temperature, relative humidity and vapour pressure deficit in a wind tower greenhouse integrated system using three-dimensional CFD analysis. The comparative advantage of wind tower integration with conventional controlling mechanisms is analyzed in this study. It has been observed that the evaporating cooling inside the windcatcher can significantly reduce temperature and enhance the relative humidity. Moreover, the potential application of wind tower in greenhouse applications for hot climatic conditions such as available in UAE have been carefully evaluated.

References:

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