A sustainable localised air distribution system for enhancing thermal environment and indoor air quality of poultry house for semiarid region

Abstract

This work compares the performance of three passive cooling systems in meeting thermal and indoor air quality requirements in a poultry house located in semi-arid climate. The first two systems are a direct evaporative cooler and a cross-flow dew point evaporative cooler supplying air through a conventional tunnel ventilation that achieves uniform thermal and indoor air quality conditions. The third system is a dew-point evaporative cooler combined with a localised ventilation system to further reduce air and water consumption. To achieve these objectives, a modular analysis was adopted where mathematical models were developed for the evaporative coolers and the tunnel-ventilated poultry house module. Moreover, a computational fluid dynamics model was developed and experimentally validated for the compartment conditioned by the localised system. The evaporative coolers were sized and the hourly variation in the required fresh air and water supply was determined for the cooling season. Results of the economic analysis showed that the cost of the dew-point evaporative cooler was 6.8% lower than that of the direct evaporative cooling, with better compliance to poultry house thermal and air quality requirements. Using localised ventilation instead of conventional with the dew point apparatus further reduced costs by 4.7%, while achieving similar conditions of temperature and air quality. © 2021 IAgrE