Articles
A THERMODYNAMIC APPROACH TO PLANT GROWTH CONTROLS IN PROTECTED CULTIVATION
Many attempts to study such interesting phenomena have been made and accumulated valuable information.
A thermodynamic approach is one of possible ways to identify the phenomena since the material transport and energy transfer obey the laws of thermodynamics.
In this paper, the phenomenological relationships based on the system of diffusion equations are introduced to model the simultaneous transfer of material and energy.
Dealing with such phenomenological relationships often gives a problem of handling many unknown parameters, so called, phenomenological coefficients in practical applications.
The system of phenomenological equations can be expressed in the form of finite element equations.
The components of the nodal vector correspond to generalized potentials such as temperature, concentrations and so on.
Since some of modal values are measurable under given boundary conditions, an inverse analysis can be applicable to estimate material properties that can be considered as phenomenological coefficients of given thermodynamic system, that is, a plant tissue in which mass and heat can be transferred.
A unique task of this study as described in this paper is to estimate phenomenological coefficients by use of Kalman filter finite element inverse analysis.
The study showed that the successful determination of the phenomenological coefficients by the Kalman filter application can put the phenomenological model into a practical phase.