A DETAILED CFD MODEL OF HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER AROUND PLANTS

An important factor for the health of crops is the local climate, i.e. the temperature and humidity around the plant and between the leaves. This is especially true for crop cultivation in plant factories, where it is often difficult to keep humidity at an acceptable level. The local climate around a plant is not easily determined, neither experimentally, nor numerically. In this paper, we propose a practical methodology to perform accurate simulations of the local climate of plants, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The overset approach is employed, which allows us to reduce meshing efforts to a minimum, while creating a high-quality grid of a complex plant geometry. For the local climate around the plant, the properties of interest are the temperature and the humidity. To be able to quantify those correctly, both heat transfer and water vapor transport are modelled. As a test case, three ventilation concepts are compared, for a domain with four plants. The ventilation strategies that employ local supply or extraction of air give a clear improvement in climate uniformity.