Airflow Modeling for Citrus under Protective Screens

Kurafeeva, Liubov and Wolski, Rich and Krintz, Chandra and Smyth, Thomas (2024) Airflow Modeling for Citrus under Protective Screens. Sensors, 24 (19). ISSN 1424-8220

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Abstract

This study explores the development and validation of an airflow model to support climate prediction for Citrus Under Protective Screens (CUPS) in California. CUPS is a permeable screen structure designed to protect a field of citrus trees from large insects including the vector that causes the devastating citrus greening disease. Because screen structures modify the environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, relative humidity, airflow), farm management and treatment strategies (e.g., pesticide spraying events) must be modified to account for these differences. Toward this end, we develop a model for predicting wind speed and direction in a commercial-scale research CUPS, using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. We describe the model and validate it in two ways. In the first, we model a small-scale replica CUPS under controlled conditions and compare modeled and measured airflow in and around the replica structure. In the second, we model the full-scale CUPS and use historical measurements to “back test” the model’s accuracy. In both settings, the modeled airflow values fall within statistical confidence intervals generated from the corresponding measurements of the conditions being modeled. These findings suggest that the model can aid decision support and smart agriculture solutions for farmers as they adapt their farm management practices for CUPS structures.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	© 2024 by the authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Computer Science and the Environment
Depositing User:	Thomas Smyth
Date Deposited:	20 Jan 2025 11:34
Last Modified:	20 Jan 2025 11:34
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4549

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