Application of Hybrid Solar-wind Power Systems and Shallow Geothermal Systems to Net-zero Energy Plant Factory
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Hu, Jiun-Wei
Abstract
Plant factory refers to a closed or semi-closed high-quality growing system for vegetables. The system cultivates vegetables through artificial control of water, light, temperature, moisture, and carbon dioxide concentration, so it requires high initial construction and operation costs. The operation costs are mainly due to the electricity consumption of lighting and air-conditioning. Past research have done much work on reducing plant factory’s electricity consumption, however, little have considered replacing traditional air-conditioning system with renewable energy or constructing an power system for plant factory. This research innovated a new method to build up net-zero plant factory (NZPF) - by combining mat foundation heat exchanger (MFHE) system and stand-alone hybrid solar-wind (SASW) power system. Performance prediction was conducted by ANSYS Icepak - a novel computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation software, including: two cooling models (basement model and plant factory model), three cooling designs, of four seasons. Both parts’ performance tests were anticipated to be accomplished yearend. First part’s prediction results demonstrated that cooling capacities were identical in both traditional air-conditioning system and mat foundation heat exchanger system. Namely, the latter’s energy conservation benefits analysis displayed that: (1) power consumption of air-conditioning system can be reduced by low-power water cooling apparatus, (2) basement model (indoor environment global cooling model) can achieve its energy conservation efficiency up to 93.5% (3) plant factory model (local cooling model) can achieve its energy conservation efficiency to 23.4% (with jointed fan coil) and up to 79.7% (with forced convection with cooling fan). Temperature simulation data in this study is predictive to a NZPF’s environment temperature, laying foundation to future experiments. Finally, solar-wind power system’s performance test and its experimental data is shown in the end of chapter 4. The net-zero energy plant factory’s cost-benefit analysis presented its payback period as 16.6 years.
Subjects
shallow geothermal energy
stand-alone hybrid solar-wind power system
mat foundation heat exchanger system
plant factory’s cooling design
net-zero energy plant factory
SDGs
Type
thesis
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