Abstract
The uniformity of the environmental conditions in a vertical farm can be poor due to multi-layer cultivation shelves, crop resistance to airflow, and excessive heat generated by artificial lighting, decreasing overall crop yield and quality. This study evaluates the performance of two air distribution systems, i.e., long-side air supply and short-side air supply, in a generic multi-layer vertical farm using a validated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling approach. The simulation results show that under identical airflow rates, the average air temperature in crop regions from short-side air supply is higher than the long-side case. In addition, stagnation regions exist in both scenarios, where the removal efficiency of water vapor and heat is low. Further study is required to improve the uniformity of air distribution in crop regions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 01008 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | E3S Web of Conferences |
| Volume | 356 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 31 Aug 2022 |
| Event | 16th ROOMVENT Conference, ROOMVENT 2022 - Xi'an, China Duration: 16 Sept 2022 → 19 Sept 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Luyang Kang is currently a postdoctoral fellow funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) (NWO project SKY HIGH: Vertical farming, a revolution in plant production; P18-07-Project C1). This research is part of the TTW Perspectief programme “Sky High”, which is supported by AMS Institute, Bayer, Bosman van Zaal, Certhon, Fresh Forward, Grodan, Growy, Own Greens/Vitroplus, Priva, Signify, Solynta, Unilever, van Bergen Kolpa Architects, and the Dutch Research Council (NWO). They are gratefully acknowledged for their financial support. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the partnership with ANSYS CFD. This work was carried out on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of SURF Cooperative (Grant no. EINF-361 and EINF-2046).