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Over the past century livestock housing facilities have evolved from traditional wooden barns to engineered structures made of plastic and steel. Although building materials have changed dramatically to match the needs of modern agriculture, the facility design process continues to lag considerably with farmers and consultants developing and adapting designs based on rules of thumb and past experience. Virtual Engineering tools are presented that couple computational tools with building geometry in a virtual reality environment enabling a livestock production specialist (farmer) to interactively alter the shape, size, operating conditions, or other characteristics of the components within the proposed system and immediately see the impact of these changes on his/her production operation.

This presentation will discuss the capabilities of Virtual Engineering technology packaged in VE_SUITE, an open source virtual reality software tool being developed at Iowa State University. The technologies wrapped in VE_SUITE will be discussed, including: user interface, numerical modeling, boundary condition and grid augmentation in virtual reality. A case study of Virtual Engineering performed on a mechanically ventilated swine enclosure to show airflow is presented in this paper.