Heat pipe as a cooling mechanism in an aeroponic system

Abstract

This paper presents an establishment of a mathematical model explaining the operation of an aeroponic system for agricultural products. The purpose is to study the rate of energy consumption in a conventional aeroponic system and the feasibility of employing a heat pipe as an energy saver in such a system. A heat pipe can be theoretically employed to remove heat from the liquid nutrient that flows through the growing chamber of an aeroponic system. When the evaporator of the heat pipe receives heat from the nutrient, the inside working fluid evaporates into vapor and flows to condense at the condenser section. The outlet temperature of the nutrient from the evaporator section is, therefore, decreased by the heat removal mechanism. The heat pipe can also be used to remove heat from the greenhouse by applying it on the greenhouse wall. By doing this, the nutrient temperature before entering into the nutrient tank decreases and the cooling load of evaporative cooling will subsequently be decreased. To justify the heat pipe application as an energy saver, numerical computations have been done on typical days in the month of April from which maximum heating load occurs and an appropriate heat pipe set was theoretically designed. It can be seen from the simulation that the heat pipe can reduce the electric energy consumption of an evaporative cooling and a refrigeration systems in a day by 17.19% and 10.34% respectively. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.