## 1 Introduction  
The world's population could increase by up to two billion people between 2022 and 2050 according to the United Nations [1]. At the end of this period, it is estimated that it will be necessary to increase food production by up to 100%, a challenging task due to climate change, hunger, and the demand for land, facts that may increase the pressure on the use of natural resources [2]. In this scenario, it is crucial that the livestock sector continues to provide a safe supply of animal products, contributing to food security, job creation, and people's revenue [3, 4]. To ensure the supply of animal products, current livestock farming has become intensive, being characterized by small-area farms, high-use inputs, and production in collective facilities, with the presence of thermal conditioning systems and some level of automation, enabling an increase in the number of animals and production rates [5, 4, 6]. Through the use of confinement facilities, it is possible to produce food of animal origin throughout the year and even in places where the production of pasture is not feasible, as production is less dependent on external environmental conditions and forager seasonality [7]. However, to achieve good performance indexes, it is necessary to maintain the thermal-environmental conditions within determined limits, in a way that the productive and reproductive performance of the animals do not be affected [8; 9]. In dairy cattle production, the Compost-Bedded Pack Barn (CBP) system, characterized by collective facilities with organic material compost bedding, has been gaining prominence and use worldwide [10; 11]. In this type of system, it is important to maintain thermal comfort and bedding moisture, essential conditions that can ensure that good production rates are going to be achieved [11; 12]. Therefore, knowing the internal distribution of the thermal environmental conditions and bedding moisture in the animal-occupied zone (AOZ), as well as establishing relationships between ventilation conditions and bedding management, is highly relevant [13; 14]. However, for CBP systems with open sides, understanding the thermal and bedding environments is still a great challenge, especially due to the complexity and variability of environmental conditions [15; 16], making studies in this area essential. By conducting evaluation studies of the thermal and bedding environments in CBP systems with open sides, it is expected that it will be possible to obtain detailed information about their operation, identify design and management failures, and propose and make available innovative solutions to producers [17; 18]. Preferably, the studies should be carried out at the field level in typical facilities and with the presence of animals, but, taking into consideration that these are large-scale facilities, it is important to remember that conducting experiments is expensive and difficult [19; 20]. Alternative and complementary to field studies, the assessment of thermal environmental and bedding conditions can be performed using numerical methods, including the Computational Fluid Dynamics technique--CFD [21; 22]. CFD is one of the main techniques that uses numerical methods to characterize, interpret, and quantify heat and mass transfer phenomena using the numerical solution of conservation equations via computation [7; 23]. In practice, the application of the CFD technique allows engineering professionals to represent complex regions of physical systems, such as animal facilities, using computational models, considering the most diverse internal and surrounding conditions [23; 24; 25; 26]. Due to its versatility, the CFD technique has been increasingly applied for modeling airflow and moisture conditions in agricultural facilities, being considered an ideal complement for field measurements [27].