Modeling Environmental Conditions in Poultry Production: Computational Fluid Dynamics Approach

Area of Science:

• Agricultural Engineering
• Environmental Science
• Computational Science

Background:

• Poultry house environmental conditions significantly impact animal welfare and productivity.
• Assessing and optimizing these environments traditionally involves complex measurements.
• Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has emerged as an efficient alternative for environmental assessment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To provide a comprehensive review of recent advancements in CFD applications for poultry housing environments.
• To guide researchers in identifying relevant CFD studies.
• To consolidate knowledge on CFD methodologies, challenges, and future directions in this field.

Main Methods:

• Literature review of CFD studies in poultry housing.
• Categorization of studies based on key environmental aspects: inlet/fan configuration, ventilation design, temperature-humidity, airflow, and emissions.
• Analysis of commonly used turbulence models (e.g., k-ε variants).
• Discussion of CFD process challenges and solutions, including path planning.

Main Results:

• CFD is widely applied to analyze ventilation, air quality, and emissions in poultry houses.
• Standard k-ε, RNG k-ε, and realizable k-ε are prevalent turbulence models.
• Key areas of CFD application include airflow distribution and environmental parameter analysis.
• Challenges in CFD implementation include data acquisition, validation, and meshing.

Conclusions:

• CFD is a valuable and increasingly adopted tool for poultry house environmental management.
• Future research should focus on integrating CFD with machine learning, BIM, and control systems.
• Addressing current challenges will further enhance the utility and accuracy of CFD in this domain.