Advances of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications in agricultural building modelling: Research, applications and challenges

• CFD applications deal with optimal design and operation of agricultural buildings. • Key progress includes interactions of plants or animals with local environment. • Special care is taken in the validation of CFD results and transfer to operational. • Novel agricultural designs and operations can be investigated using CFD. • CFD integrated to decision support systems for semi-automated food factory systems. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach is a versatile technique being applied to multiple areas of knowledge. CFD approach has contributed to comprehensively understand the complexity of biological systems and it has gained relevance since the end of the twentieth century. CFD became the key approach to replicate spatiotemporal phenomena combining fundamentals of physics, chemistry and biology. A considerable development derived from numerous CFD studies has been accomplished in a large range of applications in agriculture such as biological systems, and in agricultural buildings in particular. This paper provides an examination of recent progress (last 2 decades) in CFD studies, mainly applied to greenhouses and livestock buildings with the aim to depict current status and trends and potential research directions. Current status comprises CFD applied to regional and local climate, housing design and operation and animal or plant interaction with its surroundings. Integrating different scales from animal or plant physiologic responses to an agricultural building and to a region, CFD capabilities have made it possible to considerably improve the realism of simulations. Applications also cover a focus on specific equipments with the aim to assess benefits on energy and water fluxes. Additionally, the issues of validation and reliability of CFD simulations are addressed as well as the perspective of coupling CFD to operational devices or decision-making systems, based on ICT, IoT, or Artificial Intelligence.