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.

A substantial reduction in the environmental impacts related to the construction and operation of agricultural buildings is needed to adapt to the continuing development of agriculture. The life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology used to quantify the environmental impact of different processes involved in the production and therefore has been increasingly applied to assess the environmental burden. However, most LCA-related research studies have focused on the overall environmental impact of the entire system without considering the energy load of the agricultural buildings. By integrating the LCA tool with other design tools such as the building energy simulation (BES), the identification of environmental hotspots and the mitigation options become possible during the design process. Thus, the objective of the paper was to identify the current integration approaches used to combine BES and LCA results to assess the environmental impact of different heating systems such as absorption heat pump (AHP) using energy from thermal effluent, electricity-powered heat pump and kerosene-powered boilers used in a conventional multi-span Korean greenhouse. The assessment result revealed that the environmental impact caused using a kerosene-powered boiler is largest in terms of the acidification potential (AP), global warming potential (GWP) and Eutrophication Potential (EP) of 1.15 × 10⁰ kg SO₂-eq, 1.13 × 10² kg CO₂-eq and 1.62 × 10⁻¹ kg PO₄-eq, respectively. Detailed analysis of the result showed that the main contributor for greenhouse gas emission was caused by the type, amount and source of energy used to heat the greenhouse, which contributed to a maximum of 86.59% for case 1, 96.69% for case 2 and a maximum of 96.47% for case 3, depending on the type of greenhouse gas being considered.

To utilize the energy in the thermal effluent, many attempts have been made to use the thermal effluent for agricultural facilities such as greenhouses. As the first step, it is important to estimate the energy loads of the greenhouse for deciding a suitable scale for the heating and cooling. Then, it is available to estimate the energy efficiency of the thermal effluent heat pump system installed in the greenhouse. Therefore, the main objectives of this study were to design and validate an energy model of the experimental greenhouse growing Irwin mangoes and to estimate the annual and maximum energy loads using building energy simulation (BES). Field experiments were conducted in a multi-span plastic-covered greenhouse growing Irwin mangoes to measure the internal environments of the greenhouse and crop characteristics. The energy exchange model of the greenhouse considering crop, cladding, heat pump was developed using BES. The BES model was validated using the data measured at field experiments. The designed model was found to be able to provide satisfactory estimates of the changes of the internal air temperature of the greenhouse (R² = 0.94 and d = 0.97). The hourly energy loads computed by using the validated model were used to analyse the periodic and maximum energy loads according to the growth stage of the cultivated crops. Finally, the energy costs were compared according to the type of energy source based on the calculated annual energy loads. The average energy cost when using the thermal effluent—heat pump system was found to be 68.21% lower than that when a kerosene boiler was used.