ABSTRACT
There are many methods to study greenhouse ventilation, for example, tracer gas measurement, windtunnel experiments, theoretical models describe the air exchange, greenhouse ventilation model by the basic relationships between the flow rate and the pressure difference owing to buoyancy or wind effect for one opening, expect those, there are even experiment researches, but the previous sparse experiments were made in mostly empty and small houses, isolated compartments and scale models, reasons for not using large commercial glasshouses as the subject of the research program are the high cost in time and expense to conduct detailed measurements, the fear of yield losses resulting from large-scale experiments in operating glasshouses, the availability of commercial sized glasshouses for experimental work and the complexity of the measurements. All above methods cannot yielded details of internal and external flow patterns, the results from small-scale experiments do not represent the behavior of a modern commercial glasshouse, the effects of crops on the internal climate are difficult to measure and experiments have rarely taken place, and make experimental in large commercial greenhouses need high cost in time and expense to conduct detailed measurements, so Fluent simulate can get over this problem. When used Fluent correctly, it can provide accurate and detailed simulations of the transport processes inside the greenhouse and provide the horticultural industry with plausible information on the greenhouse climate and reduce the need for extensive and expensive measurements. Fluent is one of the commercial CFD packages, and which is be widely used computational fluid dynamics software currently. Originally, Fluent is not be used in horticulture but other research field, for example, in the chemical, automotive, aerospace and nuclear industries. Until 1989, the first CFD simulations for studying greenhouse ventilation were conduced by okushima et al..
