Analysis of airflow distribution on urban mini plant factory using computational fluid dynamics

Abstract

Limited land for agricultural cultivation in urban areas makes it difficult to fulfill for healthy and sustainable food. Mini Plant Factory is an alternative to produce food, especially vegetables. In the Mini Plant Factory, the distribution of air flow is one thing that must be considered because the air flow will affect the growth of the plants in it so it is necessary to do an analysis to determine the good air flow in the mini plant factory using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software. The purpose of this study was to analyse the aeration of the air flow in the mini plant factory using Computational Fluid Dynamics. This research was carried out at smart agriculture UGM, in this study using a mini plant factory measuring 70 x 40 x 150 cm, which is equipped with a temperature sensor (DHT 22) of 1 units in each shelf and 1 unit on the outside for measure environmental conditions, with a total number of 4 temperature sensors, the mini plant factory is also equipped with an automatic nutrition system that is integrated with the cloud, and is equipped with artificial lighting. CFD analysis was carried out using the Ansys 2022 software, the laptop specifications used were AMD Ryzen 7 4800 H, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050. Temperature data was measured during the observation period. The analysis method in CFD has several stages, namely preparation, meshing workflow, mesh, models, materials, boundary conditions, solution and post-processing. The last part is data validation, namely by making a comparison between the CFD results and the actual data, then calculating the error value using MAPE. The expected result are visualisation various distribution of aeration temperatures inside mini plant factory, optimum aeration design for mini plant factory.