Title: Emerging temperature and humidity control options for agricultural applications
Abstract:
For any nation, primary sources of energy consumption are involved in heating, cooling, humidification, dehumidification, ventilation and/or air-conditioning (HVAC), which may be required for various applications. Currently, Pakistan is facing extreme energy shortage, therefore, low-cost, and energy-efficient HVAC systems are principally required. As the Pakistan is an agriculture dependent country, therefore, low-cost HVAC systems are required not only for humans’ thermal comfort but also for various agriculture-based applications e.g., greenhouse air-conditioning, agricultural products’ (fruits and vegetables) storage, and animals’ (livestock) air-conditioning etc. In this regard, various innovative cooling and air-conditioning technologies have been introduced worldwide. Consequently, in this keynote speech, evaporative cooling and adsorption cooling based HVAC technologies are explored. These technologies are environmentally safe and can be simply operated by water or low-grade waste heat. The low-grade waste heat can be supplied economically by many ways e.g., solar thermal energy, natural coal, biogas and/or biomass etc. From the prospective of evaporative cooling, the speech focuses on Maisotsenko cycle (M-cycle) based evaporative cooling conception in comparison with conventional direct and indirect evaporative cooling. While adsorption cooling and desiccant air-conditioning systems are focused from the prospective of thermally driven systems. Importance of selection of refrigerant and adsorbent/desiccant is also highlighted. Based on geographic and climatic conditions of Pakistan, role of temporal and spatial variation for the development of sustainable HVAC system is addressed.
Biography:
Dr. Muhammad Sultan is an Associate Professor of Energy & Environmental Engineering at Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan (Pakistan). He completed his PhD and Postdoc from Kyushu University (Japan) in the field of Energy & Environmental Engineering as an awardee of MEXT and JASSO fellowships, respectively. He did a Postdoc as a Canadian Queen Elizabeth Advance Scholar at Simon Fraser University (Canada) in the field of Mechatronic Systems Engineering. He worked for Kyushu University International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research (WPI-I2CNER) for two years. Currently, he is working on 5 research projects funded by the Pakistan Higher Education Commission, and UK Research & Innovation. He has supervised 15 M.Eng. and 1 Ph.D. thesis. He has published 143 journal articles with cumulative impact factor of 600+. In addition, he published 100+ conference articles, 20 book chapters, and 10 books. His research citations are 2600+ along with h-index of 26, and i10-index of 73. He is serving the Editor role for several SCI journals including Agriculture (IF 3.41), Sustainability (IF 3.89), Energies (IF 3.25), Water (IF 3.53), Advances in Mechanical Engineering (IF 1.57), Frontiers in Energy Research (IF 3.86), Journal of Agricultural Sciences (IF 0.67). His research keywords include (but not limited to) evaporative cooling, desiccant air-conditioning, adsorption heat pump, Maisotsenko cycle (M-cycle), adsorption desalination, atmospheric water harvesting, and energy recovery ventilators.