Library Subscription: Guest

ISSN Online: 2379-1748

7th Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference (TFEC)
SJR: 0.152 SNIP: 0.14 CiteScore™:: 0.5

Indexed in

Clarivate CPCI (Proceedings) Scopus
May, 15-18, 2022 , Las Vegas, NV, USA

MODELLING AND SIMULATING THE MICROCLIMATE OF A MODULAR PLANT GROWTH CHAMBER DESIGNED FOR INDOOR FARMING

Get access (open in a dialog) pages 1215-1221
DOI: 10.1615/TFEC2022.ref.041165

Abstract

Energy is one of the largest operating cost for indoor farms in tropics. Two most significant elements of energy consumption comes from indoor air cooling and LED lighting. The heat emitted by the LED lights further increases the cooling load. There is a need to develop a new way to cool both the indoor air and LED lights with much lower energy consumption. In this paper, an integrated LED and microclimate cooling system is presented. The system combines the LED with the plant growth tray in a modular design which can be replicated for a larger scale indoor farm. The modular plant growth chamber has built in features which allows the nutrient water to flow through the growth tray and return to the nutrient water tank where it is chilled before being recirculated. The effect of the flowing chilled nutrient water on the air temperature and humidity in the growth environment is evaluated through a microclimate model. The result of this analysis shows that there is up to 10°C reduction in the air temperature near the root zone of the plant. There is also a reduction in moisture content in the air when the nutrient water is circulated at temperature of less than 15°C. This microclimate model is also able to simulate the cooling load required to maintain an ideal environment for plant growth. The simulation result shows that modular plant growth chamber is able to control both the temperature and humidity while maintaining a balance of the energy consumption.