Creator(s): Ana Sola, Adrian Sperl, Dylan Hutra, Michael Stamm
Course: CHME4703 Process Design Chemical Engineering Capstone
Trusted Thermal Consulting, LLC is consulting for AgriTech North, a non- profit organization based in Dryden, ON, with a mission to battle the larger issue of food insecurity that plagues indigenous communities in Northern Ontario. The proposed vertical farm adopts a solar tri-generation system to provide energy, heating, and cooling for the facility, reducing the current demand for electricity and natural gas. The design proposes the use of a potassium formate heat transfer fluid (HTF) to capture heat generated by solar-thermal panels outside of the facility, as well as the excess heat generated by grow lights in the vertical farm. A well-insulated tank containing a phase-changing material (PCM), hexadecane wax, will be used to store the thermal energy, which will then be fed to an adsorption-based chiller. The process was simulated in Python using solar irradiance data collected hourly in Dryden for 18 years.