Experimental results on air permeability of agricultural nets

Abstract

In order to evaluate the influence of the texture characteristics of agricultural nets on the air flow passing through them, a micro wind tunnel was designed and built in the testing and engineering laboratory of Sachim s.r.l., an Italian high-density polyethylene (HDPE) technical textiles manufacturer. The micro wind tunnel (0.1345 m diameter) allowed the simultaneous measurement of the air flowrate and the pressure drop through a net sample. The equipment was designed to set up the inclination of the net samples with respect of the airflow at fixed angles (90°, 60°, 45°, 30°). The variation of the pressure drop with the air velocity on four different flat woven round monofilament HDPE nets perpendicular to the air flow are here reported. In all cases the air velocity measured into the micro wind tunnel was above 4 m s–1 hence reported results do not consider low wind speed. Preliminarily, the loss coefficient was assumed as a function of porosity and Reynolds number, calculated with reference to the equivalent diameter of the pores, FS(Rel,ε) and showed percent deviations form experimental results in the range 14.6%÷25.3%. Hence a simplified expression of the loss coefficient, depending only on the porosity was proposed, FS(ε) which highlighted differences with experimental results in the range 3.5%÷20.3%. Finally, results were compared with those based on the Bernoulli’s principle found in the literature.