Greenhouse Microclimate Flow Simulation: Influence of Inlet Flow Conditions

Abstract

Greenhouse (GH) has been demonstrated as a profitable technology for food production with low demand of irrigation water. In this work, a numerical model is developed to study the micro-climatic environmental conditions inside a greenhouse distillation system for optimize operation. The system performance (temperatures, flow velocities, relative humidity) is presented and improvement factors for the system performance are suggested. The result shows that the inlet velocity and plant transpiration have a more pronounced effect on the relative humidity than the incoming temperature variation. As temperature increases by 8Co the relative humidity decreases with few percentiles (~2%). When velocity varies between 0.2-0.7m/s, and within the diurnal operation of the GH, an increase of up to 5 points in the humidity is observed. Finally, when the transpiration increases from 0.2 to 1.2 g/m3 the relative humidity observes a drastic jump of over 15 points.