The Use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) within the Agricultural Industry to Address General and Manufacturing Problems

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a numerical tool often used to predict anticipated observations using only the physics involved by numerically solving the conservation equations for energy, momentum, and continuity. These governing equations have been around for more than one hundred years, but only limited analytical solutions exist for specific geometries and conditions. CFD provides a numerical solution to these governing equations, and several commercial software and shareware versions exist that provide numerical solutions for customized geometries requiring solutions. Often, experiments are cost prohibitive and/or time consuming, or cannot even be performed, such as the explosion of a chemical plant, downwind air concentrations and the impact on residents and animals, contamination in a river from a point source loading following a train derailment, etc. A modern solution to these problems is the use of CFD to digitally evaluate the output for a given scenario. This paper discusses the use of CFD at Corteva and offers a flavor of the types of problems that can be solved in agricultural manufacturing for pesticides and environmental scenarios in which pesticides are used. Only a handful of examples are provided, but there is a near semi-infinite number of future possibilities to consider.