Abstract
Most of the broiler houses in Korea have experienced problems on controlling the environmental conditions such as suitability, stability and uniformity of rearing condition inside the broiler house. It is very critical which if not properly controlled, would cause serious stress on the chickens. It is therefore urgent to develop optimum designs of naturally ventilated broiler house which is appropriate to the four seasons of Korea. Field experiment for this matter is very difficult to conduct due to the unpredictable and uncontrollable weather condition. In this study, the heating load of a naturally ventilated broiler house was calculated using TRANSYS 15 BES program while internal climate and thermal condition were computed using Fluent 6.2. The computed resulted of the conventional ventilation system (A) and upgraded ventilation system (B) (Seo et al, 2007) were compared with each other for cold season. The results of the Building Energy Simulation(BES) indicated that the system B, the upgraded ventilation system made 8% lower total heating load and 47% lower at only the broiler zone compared to the conventional broiler house. Considering the entire broiler house, the existence of middle ceiling made the heating energy 11% lower required than without middle ceiling. Accordingly, the system B with middle ceiling was found to save heating energy by 20% in average. This study showed that the BES program can be a very powerful to effectively compute the energy loads of agricultural building while the energy load is very close related to ventilation efficiency.
