Experimental and Numerical Analysis of a Sustainable Farming Compartment with Evaporative Cooling System
1
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Omaha, NE 68588-0531, USA
2
Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0526, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Processes 2019, 7(11), 823; https://doi.org/10.3390/pr7110823
Received: 4 August 2019 / Revised: 14 October 2019 / Accepted: 29 October 2019 / Published: 6 November 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue CFD Modeling of Complex Chemical Processes: Multiscale and Multiphysics Challenges)
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) relies on groundwater as well as desalinated water which are very expensive and energy-concentrated. Despite the lack of water resources, only 54% of wastewater was recycled in the UAE in 2016. In this study, a Sustainable Farming Compartment (SFC) with an evaporative cooling system is investigated as an alternative to reusing wastewater and the optimal design is identified experimentally and numerically. First, the applicability of the SFC was examined to reduce the ambient temperature in the system. A prototype SFC was tested in the environmentally constrained laboratory and field site considering an extreme climate condition (with high temperature and humidity) in Abu Dhabi to evaluate the temperature drop and humidity change of the SFC. The experimental results showed that the temperature of the SFC significantly decreases by 7–15 °C when the initial relative humidity is 50%. For validation, an energy modeling using dynamic numerical simulations was performed that shows statistically good agreement with the experimental results. Based on the parametric studies of the system components, the optimal cooling performance of the system in terms of locations of inlet and outlet, the variation of Reynolds number was evaluated. The study suggested an optimized design for the SFC with an evaporative cooling system.
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Keywords:
heat transport; optimized design; dynamic numerical simulation; evaporative cooling system; water recycling; temperature; humidity
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MDPI and ACS Style
Mousavi, M.S.; Mirfendereski, S.; Park, J.S.; Eun, J. Experimental and Numerical Analysis of a Sustainable Farming Compartment with Evaporative Cooling System. Processes 2019, 7, 823.
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