• 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.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2013.04a
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• pp.371-372
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• 2013