Environmental & Food Sustainability

The Integrated Environmental Modeller (IEM) is an award-winning 3D multi-physics environmental modelling platform that is able to quantify the combined coupled effects of various environmental factors (i.e., solar irradiance, shading, wind, air temperature and traffic noise) on the urban environment. This allows planners, architects and engineers to quantify and analyse the impact of their urban design based on both thermal and aural comfort on the living environment (Fig 1) in one integrated workflow. IEM is currently being used for the design of Tengah Forest town.

Fig 1. Integrated Environmental Modeller platform for urban planning

Credit: The Integrated Environmental Modeller (IEM) was developed by A*STAR’s Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and the Housing & Development Board (HDB). 

In collaboration with ERS Industries Pte Ltd, a local SME specialising in server rack design and supply, IHPC has employed computational fluid dynamics simulations to aid in the server rack design, leading to an innovative rack design (E@Rack) with 30% better thermal performance, as shown in Fig 2. Dr. Kenny WU, the scientist in charge of this project, has received T-UP Excellence Award 2014, for the outstanding achievement in this project.  

To effectively buffer from supply disruptions in Singapore, IHPC helps local farmers transform and adopt technology to scale up food production capabilities by developing an interactive platform (Fig 3) that allows users to key in different parameters (i.e., light, temperature and air flow), and select different plants to simulate under varying environmental conditions. Through this platform, users get to determine the farm's performance with the realistic view of growing plants' life cycle and improve on (i) operation energy usage, (ii) output optimisation, and (iii) interact virtually with farms on site.

Fig 3:  Modelling of air flow, temperature, humidity and lighting

Applying IHPC's scientific knowledge on solar irradiance and fluid dynamics empowers us to predict, design, and optimise the farm and growing beds conditions (Fig 1). Using parametric and analogous estimation, we can provide more precise and realistic modelling of the plants in modern urban farms. The use of application knowledge-based platform and precision engineering to agriculture is known as Quantum Agritech.

This research is supported by the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), under the program titled “Sustainable Hybrid Lighting System for Controlled Environment Agriculture”.