Study of the environmental control of sow farrowing rooms by means of dynamic simulation

While there has been a great reduction of the energy demand of civil buildings in recent years, the energy demand for the environmental control of livestock buildings is still high, due to high outdoor air changes. In a livestock building, a compromise between different requirements (reducing the heating energy in winter season, avoiding heat stress for animals in summer season, controlling the relative humidity, controlling ammonia and hydrogen sulfide concentrations) has to be done and contributes to complicate the design of the structures and the operation of the ventilation system. Moreover, depending on the animal species, ages and type of housing, the environmental control requirements change considerably. In the present work, dynamic building simulation is applied to a portion of a swine unit, in particular the sow farrowing room and weaned pigs nursery, where the effects of some important construction and HVAC system choices that influence the temperature and humidity conditions and the sow thermal comfort were investigated. The results show that the use of variable flow rate fans, able to implement in the summer season free cooling with the outside air, coupled to a building structure sufficiently massive to exploit the effect of free cooling, is surely promising. The thermal insulation is useful to reduce the energy consumption for heating in winter and does not affect the summer overheating. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.