Experimental and numerical study on the effect of cooling system and openings in the roof of greenhouse

Abstract EN

Experimental and numerical studies have been carried out in a greenhouse to investigate the thermal effect of opening roof air flow ratio.

Also, the study includes the effect of installing a fan-pad system used for evaporative cooling.

Experiments have been conducted in September 2010 at outdoors in 6 October city, Egypt.

The numerical study has been carried out to validate the agreement of experimental observations with predicted values.

The numerical study represents an integrated computational study of turbulent flow and heat transfer inside the greenhouse.

In the present study, a commercial package of FLUENT® 6.2 is used to solve the governing differential equations of flow and heat transfer.

Numerical investigation was conducted to simulate an experimental results in greenhouses of sizes 1.6 m x 1.2 m x 2.38 m (W x H x L).

It is found that the use of evaporative cooling reduces the temperature of greenhouse comparing to greenhouse without evaporative cooling and the full open roof reduce also the temperature comparing to half and full closed roofs.

The cooling pads increase the relative humidity by about 32 %.