ASABE Technical Library - Abstract

Hot weather can stress livestock. The damage is even more serious when the heat is combined with heavy humidity. The wet-pad evaporative cooling systems commonly adopted in southeast China are considered an ideal method to overcome these severe environmental conditions. In this study, the hygrothermal conditions in a farrowing room with a wet-pad cooling system were evaluated with experimental and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. The field measurements were conducted in the summer to obtain air velocity, temperature, and relative humidity data. The average respiratory rate of the sows was measured to assess the hygrothermal comfort of the animals. Simulation of the indoor environment of the sows and piglets was conducted using commercial CFD software (ANSYS-Fluent 14.0) in which the boundary conditions were specified using the on-site measurements. Predicted temperature and relative humidity were validated against the measured data with a maximum error of less than 7.44%. CFD analysis of the hygrothermal conditions showed that the use of wet-pad cooling resulted in decreased air temperature and increased relative humidity around the pigs. However, the results demonstrated that the existing cooling system design did not meet the preferred thermal conditions for the animals, and suggestions were made for future research in wet-pad cooling systems.