A COMPREHENSIVE PROGRAM TO DESIGN HIGH PERFORMANCE AND HIGH EFFICIENCY AGRICULTURAL VENTILATION SYSTEMS

Tunnel ventilation is an effective means of protecting and enhancing the productivity of livestock (especially swine and egg layers) in large scale confinement barns. The capital and operating costs for these fan installations typically represents a significant fraction of the total costs to the livestock producer. The Phase I research program has shown that significant improvements (ca. 40 percent in airflow and 10 percent in efficiency) can be obtained by the judicious use of active control flows. The Phase II proposal is to permit optimized ventilation systems to be designed using advanced CFD (computational fluid dynamics) methods. The CFD codes will be proof-tested using baseline data (first iteration) and used to define the predicted/optimized configurations: the second iteration. Experiments will confirm (or suggest modifications to) the latter.