Ammonia (NH₃) emissions during agricultural production can cause serious consequences on animal and human health, and it is quite vital to develop high-efficiency adsorbents for NH₃ removal from emission sources or air. Porous metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), as the most promising candidates for the capture of NH₃, offer a unique solid adsorbent design platform. In this work, a series of MOFs with different metal centers, ZnBTC, FeBTC and CuBTC, were proposed for NH₃ adsorption. The metal centers of the three MOFs are coordinated in a different manner and can be attacked by NH₃ with different strengths, resulting in different adsorption capacities of 11.33, 9.5, and 23.88 mmol/g, respectively. In addition, theoretical calculations, powder XRD patterns, FTIR, and BET for the three materials before and after absorption of ammonia were investigated to elucidate their distinctively different ammonia absorption mechanisms. Overall, the study will absolutely provide an important step in designing promising MOFs with appropriate central metals for the capture of NH₃.

The thermal environment is crucial for livestock production. Accurately detecting thermal environmental conditions enables the implementation of appropriate methods to control the thermal environment in livestock buildings. This study reviewed a comprehensive survey of detection and control methods for thermal environments in livestock buildings. The results demonstrated that temperature, humidity, velocity, and radiation are major elements affecting the thermal comfort of animals. For single thermal environmental parameters, the commonly employed detection methods include field experiments, scale models in wind tunnels, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, and machine learning. Given that thermal comfort for livestock is influenced by multiple environmental parameters, the Effective Temperature (ET) index, which considers varying proportions of different environmental parameters on the thermal comfort of livestock, is a feasible detection method. Environmental control methods include inlet and outlet configuration, water-cooled floors, installation of a deflector and perforated air ducting (PAD) system, sprinkling, etc. Reasonable inlet configuration increased airflow uniformity by more than 10% and decreased ET by more than 9 °C. Proper outlet configuration improved airflow uniformity by 25%. Sprinkling decreased the temperature by 1.1 °C. This study aims to build a comprehensive dataset for the identification of detection and control methods in research of the thermal environment of livestock buildings.

Composting is a primary method for organic waste treatment, and ventilation is crucial for composting performance. The pipe design parameters influence ventilation efficiency, while the interactions between these parameters remain unclear. Conventional response surface methodology (RSM) is limited by discrete experimental points, potentially affecting optimization accuracy, whereas computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides a spatially resolved analysis of airflow fields within the entire compost pile. Herein, this study combines RSM and CFD to exploit their complementary strengths for more reliable optimization. A 17-run Box–Behnken design (BBD) was conducted to evaluate compost maturity under different pipe design parameters, including pipe diameter (11, 12, 13 mm), adjacent orifice spacing increment (0.5, 0.75 and 1 cm) and orifice diameter (2, 2.5 and 3 mm). Meanwhile, CFD simulations were performed to quantitatively evaluate the effects of different design parameters on airflow distribution characteristics. An experimental validation was additionally conducted under the optimal configuration. Results indicated that the optimized design parameters reduced the coefficient of air speed variation (CASV) by 55.37%. Pipe diameter, adjacent orifice spacing and orifice diameter had significant effects on germination index and humus (p < 0.01), whereas the significance of the interaction terms differed among response variables. The influence ranking on germination index and humus was as follows: pipe diameter > adjacent orifice spacing > orifice diameter. To achieve maximum composting effectiveness, the optimal pipe design parameters were determined as an adjacent orifice spacing increment of 0.78 cm, an orifice diameter of 2.83 mm, and a pipe diameter of 12.71 mm. Relative to the 17 BBD experimental runs, these optimal parameters resulted in maximum observed improvements of 18.66 percentage points in final GI and 63.36 g/kg in final HS, while the humic acid-to-fulvic acid ratio increased by 1.27. This study provides a theoretical basis for optimizing compost ventilation pipe design and improving composting performance in aerobic composting systems.