Design and simulation of a greenhouse in a computational environment (ANSYS/FLUENT) and an automatic control system in a LABVIEW environment

Greenhouses have been used to increase agricultural production. With the development of technology, they can now be automated. Many studies have been done on the automatic control of their microclimate, from intelligent control systems to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses, with the main purpose of optimal control of the microclimate and at the same time saving energy. This research concerns the process of modeling, design, and simulation of an automatic control system in greenhouses. More specifically, a virtual greenhouse (digital twin) is designed, and in it, the natural phenomena that take place in a real greenhouse are simulated. The program used for the simulations is Ansys FLUENT, suitable for CFD analyses. A branch of artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, which is a method of replicating human thinking was utilized. To find the optimal control system, four fuzzy controllers were tested, and the optimal control system that the simulations indicated was implemented on an Arduino board using the LabVIEW program. The control was done at the temperature inside the greenhouse, with real weather data from a real greenhouse.