Experimental validation of the dynamic thermal behavior of two types of agricultural greenhouses in the Mediterranean context

Agricultural greenhouses are used to maintain a favorable microclimate for production and plant growth and also to protect the canopy against diseases. The objective of this work is to develop a dynamic model describing the thermal behaviors indoor the greenhouse in order to predict the evolution of the internal air temperature under two kinds of greenhouses. The first one is a transparent greenhouse and the second one is an insulated greenhouse, which are installed in the Research and Technologies Centre of Energy in Borj Cedria (CRTEn) in Tunisia (Latitude 36°43′ and Longitude 10°25′). For this purpose, a thermodynamic modeling was proposed and simulated under MATLAB/Simulink environment to be experimentally validated into the two agricultural greenhouses during 9 days in March. The simulation results were compared to the experimental data and the fair agreement between the predicted and measured values showed the efficiency of the proposed dynamic model to predict the air temperature indoor the greenhouses with a few percentages error. •Modelling and simulation of thermal behaviors indoor a greenhouse.•Experimental validation of dynamic modeling into two kinds of greenhouses.•Performance of the proposed model to predict air temperature inside greenhouses.•Ability of the insulated greenhouse to reach a fairly high level of temperature.