Design and Implementation of a Closed-Loop Plant Factory

This paper presents a new Closed-Loop Plant Factory for scientific research, which was constructed in a semi-underground solar greenhouse. By choosing the location under the back wall, our Plant Factory would not expose to the direct sunlight and could share the benefits of the good thermal insulation performance of the greenhouse. Similar to other Plant Factories, our new one employed water culture as the main cultivation style. "Parallel connection" and "series connection" pipelines were used to serve the researchers with plenty of nutrition-liquid-solution setting options. Fluorescent lamps and Light Emitting Diode (LED) lamps were chosen as the artificial lighting sources. The LED lighting intensity could be precisely controlled through a digital controller. Other environmental factors, such as carbon dioxide concentration, air temperature and air humidity, were also controlled by an integrated control system. Experiments have been conducted in the new Plant Factory to verify its feasibility and practicality. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.