Towards a Sustainable Greenhouse: Review of Trends and Emerging Practices in Analysing Greenhouse Ventilation Requirements to Sustain Maximum Agricultural Yield

Abstract

Cultivation in open fields mainly depends on the location and time of farming, which itself highly depends on the quality and quantity of water for irrigation, weather conditions and soil characteristics. Water resources are highly dependent on the limited freshwater resources from the groundwater system, or rainwater. Countries in MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) rely mostly on desalination technologies for agriculture, due to water scarcity. Therefore, greenhouse (GH) agriculture can be developed to succeed in dealing with the water scarcity and provide sufficient sources of agricultural products as a sustainable solution. These indoor agriculture facilities, which are enclosed by transparent covers, can produce different sources of fruits and vegetables, using a controlled amount of water. By reducing the exchange rate of air with the outside environment, which is known as the confinement effects, greenhouses generate a suitable environment for the plants to grow under transparent covers to trap the sunlight. This raises the inside temperature above the maximum threshold levels, especially within the warm season, due to the high solar radiation intensity, having an adverse influence on the microclimate conditions and consequently the crop growth. In order to sustain maximum agricultural yield, greenhouse ventilation is an important parameter in which its trends and emerging practices were reviewed in this study.

Contribution to the Sustainability of Agricultural Production in Greenhouses Built on Slope Soils: A Numerical Study of the Microclimatic Behavior of a Typical Colombian Structure

“…Other study alternatives include indirect methods such as tracer gas, experiments with colored smoke streams, 3D imaging or wind tunnel tests with scale models and the results of some of these investigations can be reviewed in the work developed by Akrami et al [14]. However, there is another methodology, based on modeling and simulation that allows studying the air flow patterns inside a greenhouse and its effects on the spatial temperature distributions.…”

Availability and Feasibility of Water Desalination as a Non-Conventional Resource for Agricultural Irrigation in the MENA Region: A Review

“…A smart greenhouse system gives complete control of environmental conditions and agricultural processes through remote control ( Figure 3b). It is extremely important to control the temperature in a greenhouse environment [28]. Remote monitoring and control systems protect the plants from precarious temperatures.…”

“…In light of water scarcity, many countries in the MENA region use non-conventional water resources such as desalinated saltwater, reused agriculture drainage and wastewater [28,55,56]. Desalinated saltwater is a potential non-conventional water resource that provides water with high quality [30,31].…”

Analysis of Inlet Configurations on the Microclimate Conditions of a Novel Standalone Agricultural Greenhouse for Egypt Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

“…This means that a cooling system should remove that extra solar radiation from the GH environment. The appropriate GH heating or cooling system usually depends on the location (ambient conditions) of the site [54]. If the outside temperature average is less than 10 • C, GH is likely to require heating, especially at night.…”