Impact Analysis of Environmental Conditions on Odour Dispersion Emitted from Pig House with Complex Terrain Using CFD

Abstract

With the rise in livestock production, the odour concentration emitted from livestock facilities has significantly increased. For this reason, odour complaints have become a major issue. The dispersion of the odour into the atmosphere is affected by various factors (wind speed, wind direction, atmospheric stability, terrain condition, ventilation type, and so on). Thus, a thorough analysis on the factor influencing odour dispersion is necessary to establish regulations and policies for odour management. Therefore, this research aimed to evaluate odour dispersion generated from a pig house with complex terrain using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and to statistically determine the key factor for odour dispersion. By comparing CFD-computed results with field-measured data, an appropriate grid size, time step, and turbulence model of the CFD model were determined. Considering various factors, case studies were performed using the validated CFD model. The CFD-computed results showed that odour dispersion distance at the level of 1 OU m−3 ranged from 129.7 to 1488.1 m. The prediction of odour dispersion distance varies with the change of factor being analysed. Finally, the statistical analysis showed that the most influential factor that affected odour dispersion distance was the wind speed with a t-value: −9.057.

Keywords

• atmospheric stability
• complex odour
• complex terrain
• computational fluid dynamics
• odour dispersion