Development of a CFD model to study ventilation efficiency of mechanically ventilated pig house

Abstract

When livestock facilities in Korea have been changed larger and denser, rearing conditions have been getting worse and the productivity of animal production have been decreased. Especially in the cold season, the minimized ventilation has generally been operated to save energy cost in Korea resulting in very poor environmental condition and high mortality. While the stability, suitability, and uniformity of the rearing condition are the most important for high productivity, the ventilation configuration is the most important to improve the rearing condition seasonally. But, it is so difficult to analyze the internal air flow and the environmental factors by conducting only field experiment because the weather condition is very unpredictable and unstable as well as the structural specification can not be easily changed by the researchers considering cost and labor. Accordingly, an aerodynamic computer simulation was adopted to this study to overcome the weakness of conducting field experiment and study the aerodynamic itself. It has been supposed that the airflow is the main mechanism of heat, mass, and momentum transfers. To make the simulation model accurately and actually, simplified pig models were also developed. The accuracy of the CFD simulation model was enhanced by 4.4 % of errors compared with the data collected from field experiments. In this paper, using the verified CFD model, the CFD computed internal rearing condition of the mechanically ventilated pig house were analyzed quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Later, this developed model will be computed time-dependently to effectively analyze the seasonal ventilation efficiency more practically and extensively with tracer gas decay theory.