The Pavitt taxonomy of invention in industry places agriculture is the bucket of “supplier dominated”. That is, most of the technological improvements in the sector come from the suppliers of the inputs (seed firms, fert firms, machinery firms, etc). This seems reasonable, given R&D is an expensive and risky game. Most farmers can neither afford…
Read more
The major highlight is, as always, the ability to meet with ones peers. Even if the cost of travel to Mons skyrocketed as a result of the issues in the airline industry, just having the chance to meet the people who share your passion is worth its weight in gold alone. Of the more innovative…
Read more
The 78th IIRB Congress was held 21 to 23 June 2022, in Mons, Belgium, at the the Wallonia Conference Center. This is a summary of the contributions NBR made to the Congress. First and foremost, the Chair of the entire IIRB organisation in 2022 was none other than the NBR Managing Director, Desirée Börjesdotter. That…
Read more
OpenFoam version: 9 Solvers: clampPimpleFoam (v5), pimpleFoam Case: clamp_16 IT’S ALIVE I’m not sure if this is the most elegant solution available within the OpenFoam environment, but to swap the inlet and outlet, simply, two different geometries are used. When the air is flowing left-to-right (ltr), the geometry with the inlet on the left is…
Read more
In the first attempt at finding a solution to this model, the wrong kinematic viscosity was used. This permitted a solution to be found, but it was worthless. Once the correct kinematic viscosity for air was given, the steady state model would just diverge. The reason appears to be the simple fact that the model…
Read more
UNDER CONSTRUCTION 2022-03-03: require experimental data for the permeability of the cover material TopTex. OpenFOAM version: 9 CASE: clamp_06, case_06_empty_clamp Solver: clampPimpleFoam-2 This post builds on two previous posts in which two heat equations were added to the pimpleFoam solver: one for the fluid phase, and one for the solid phase. That said, this post…
Read more
Case: clamp_05 Solver: clampPimpleFoam-1 -> clampPimpleFoam-2 This post is the second of two that are a record of how to modify the pimpleFoam solver of OpenFOAM to include heat transfer when there is: a porous region, two phases in this porous region (gas and solid), and a heat source within the solid phase. In the…
Read more
This post summaries the current information around how using data from a penetrometer could inform decisions around variety selection in sugar beet, including the particular cautions that need to be observed. SUMMARY The data is informative, can be cheap to obtain, but does not provide a complete picture. AVAILABLE DATA The exact terminology used in…
Read more
This post discusses the estimation of the surface area of sugar beet. For now, this is largely guess work – no empirical data to confirm the modelling results has yet been sourced. It seems likely that some experiment data exists (Stefan Paulus at Ifz, I’m looking at you), but it hasn’t been asked for yet.…
Read more
Case: clamp_04 Solver: pimpleFoam -> clampPimpleFoam This post is the first of two that a record of how to modify the pimpleFoam solver of OpenFOAM to include heat transfer when there is: a porous region, two phases (gas and solid = porous region), and a heat source within the solid region. In this post, a…
Read more