• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.11
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• pp.7990-8000
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• 2015

Plant factories are plant cultivation systems which produce farm products uniformly under the controlled environmental condition regardless of seasons and places. Thermal flow in the plant factory is an important parameter in cultivating plants. In this research, we study thermal flow characteristics for a hybrid plant factory with multi-layer cultivation shelves using computer simulation techniques. In order to obtain numerical solutions for thermal flow characteristics, a finite volume method was applied. We consider a low-Reynolds-number ${\kappa}-{\epsilon}$ turbulence model, incompressible viscous flows, and pressure boundary conditions for numerical simulation. Commercial software Solid Works Flow Simulation is then used to investigate characteristics of thermal flows in the plant factory applying several different inflow air velocities and arrangements of cultivation shelves. From numerical analysis results, we found that temperatures in cultivation shelves were uniformly distributed for Case 3 when the inflow air velocity was 1.6 m/s by using a blower in the plant factory. However in Case 1 lower temperature distributions were observed in test beds, TB2 and TB3, which indicated that additional temperature control efforts would be required. Average shelf temperature increased by $3^{\circ}C$ using artificial light source (DYLED47) with 50% blue and 50% red LED ratios. Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society.

• Journal of Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.79-93
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• 2015

Three-dimensional structures of large ocean rings in the Gulf Stream region are investigated using the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM). Numerically simulated flow structures around four selected cyclonic and anticyclonic rings are compared with two different horizontal resolutions: $1/12^{\circ}$ and $1/48^{\circ}$. The vertical distributions of Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCSs) are analyzed using Finite Size Lyapunov Exponent (FSLE) and Okubo-Weiss parameters (OW). Curtain-shaped FSLE ridges are found in all four rings with extensions of surface ridges throughout the water columns, indicating that horizontal stirring is dominant over vertical motions. Near the high-resolution rings, many small-scale flow structures with size O(1~10) km are observed while these features are rarely found near the low-resolution rings. These small-scale structures affect the flow pattern around the rings as flow particles move more randomly in the high-resolution models. The dispersion rates are also affected by these small-scale structures as the relative horizontal dispersion coefficients are larger for the high-resolution models. The absolute vertical dispersion rates are, however, lower for the high-resolution models, because the particles tend to move along inclined eddy orbits when the resolution is low and this increases the magnitude of absolute vertical dispersion. Since relative vertical dispersion can reduce this effect from the orbital trajectories of particles, it gives a more reasonable magnitude range than absolute dispersion, and so is recommended in estimating vertical dispersion rates.