Thermal Analysis and Experimental Validation of Environmental Condition Inside Greenhouse in Tropical Wet and Dry Climate
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I believe that the paper 'Thermal Analysis and Experimental Validation of 2 Environmental Condition Inside Greenhouse in Tropical Wet and Dry Climate of India' by Gadhesaria et al. is potentially an interesting work.
However, it needs a substantial improvement, making it more clear and understandable.
General comments
English should be improved.
The list of variable is very useful but the lack of variable acronyms explanation along the text make very hard to understand the equations while reading the paper
figure captions should be improved, better explaining what is presented.
Abstract
The abstract is not well structured and should explain better what has been done by the authors.
Introduction
The introduction is very short and completely lacks of refereces in the first part (for instance about greenhouses use in India).
Materials and Methods
No description of the environmental features of Surat are provided, only some characterization of Surat climate is provided in the introduction. It should be moved to this section, extended and supported by means of data and references.
In table 1 please explain the choice of parameters values (e.g. hr). WHy did you chose that specific value? is that the result of calibration? did you take values from references?
The section "2.7 experimental details" completely lacks of the description of the measurements (instruments used, sampling methods...)
The model structure is well presented but the athors should be more clear defining the input of the model (variables and time step), the parametrization of the model and the output obtained.
Results and discussion
Statistical results are presented inside the figures. It should be better to add tables.
Looking at the figures, it seems that the greenhouse temperature is more similar to the ambient temperature (outer air temperature?) than the simulated one. If that is true, there are severe limitation to the use of model that should be stated in the conclusions.
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
The authors carried out a study entitled: "Thermal analysis and experimental validation of the environmental conditions inside a greenhouse in the humid and dry tropical climate of India" with the following objective "Calculation of the energy consumption of a uniform greenhouse in climatic conditions of Surat, Gujarat to predict the energy needs in the greenhouse
The paper presents a valid protocol from a scientific point of view. However, there are points that need to be improved.
Introduction: needs to be expanded; the authors report only three citations, too few for a scientific article.
Materials and methods: Lines 224-229 it is not clear how the parameters of temperature, humidity and air speed were measured and recorded. Authors must describe the tools used.
Results and discussion: the results are not compared with those obtained from other scientific articles. Authors should increase the discussion by reporting the results obtained by other authors.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
The paper presents a study of the energy needs of a greenhouse to keep the temperature at the target levels, and is carried out on a specific greenhouse. The scientific content of the paper is too weak, the conclusions are quite basic and the potential to extend the results to other cases is not clear. References are quite limited compared to the state of the art, and should be expanded to take into consideration the advances in this field: a considerable amount of research has been conducted to study the microclimate of greenhouses and model energy needs for environmental control, with particular reference to numerical modelling and simulation. Static and dynamic models, both in the field of energy modelling and simulations and CFD, have been being developed by various authors, to investigate the complex thermal interrelations inside the greenhouses. The authors develop a steady state thermal model to predict the temperature of the greenhouse, which is claimed to be useful for greenhouse performance studies under a variety of climatic conditions and different operating conditions, but this is quite general and not proven.
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors implemented the paper making it suitable for publication in the journal.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
the authors have improved the state of the art section but no substantial change has been carried out about the other weaknesses.
Author Response
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