Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS), a Dundee, Scotland-based agritech company specialising in indoor vertical farming, has adopted SimScale’s cloud-native CFD platform to simulate the internal environment of its Growth Tray with Lights (GTL). The GTL is the core growing unit within IGS’s Growth Tower, where LED bars provide light, HVAC-driven air is channelled through its structure, and nutrients are delivered directly to the plants. Since thermal and airflow behaviour emerges from multiple heat-generating components interacting simultaneously within a confined space, predicting performance analytically is challenging.
IGS used SimScale’s Conjugate Heat Transfer solver — integrated directly with its PTC Creo CAD workflow, avoiding the need for file conversions between CAD and simulation environments — to simulate and validate these conditions digitally, supporting a streamlined simulation workflow. Since any design change in vertical farming must clear a mandatory biological growth trial before reaching production, IGS used simulation to narrow down design decisions ahead of physical testing. The results closely matched physical test data, providing the team with a validated CFD model to assess component layout, airflow geometry, and thermal management strategies digitally before those trials begin.
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