A Study on Improving Efficiency of Home Appliance Style Plant Cultivation Equipment

• Main Authors: Po-Lin Wu, 吳柏林
• Other Authors: 方煒
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/389sft

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 生物產業機電工程學研究所 === 105 === The goal of this study is to establish a cooling system suitable for home appliance style plant cultivation equipment and to find the optimal cultivation system and the corresponding root zone temperature to improve the efficiency of the cultivation equipment. First, we establish the cooling system for the nutrient solution using thermoelectric chips and then compared the cooling results and total energy consumption of different control methods. After that, we cultivate butter lettuce and frilly lettuce using different cultivation systems under different root zone temperatures at high air temperature to find the optimal cultivation system and root zone temperature. Finally, we cultivate butter lettuce using the home appliance style plant cultivation equipment combining cooling system and the optimal cultivation system to verify the feasibility of the improving strategy. The results show that the cooling system can save about 44% of the total energy consumption of the system by using Fuzzy PID as the system control method compared with traditional on-off control. Using the ebb and flood cultivation system and maintaining root zone temperature at 25°C has the highest efficiency. However, the strategy doesn’t improve the efficiency for the growth of frilly lettuce. Finally, we find that using improving strategy on the home appliance style plant cultivation equipment produces butter lettuce with shoot weight of 81.8 g. Also, it can increase 174.6% of the total yield and 33.7% of the efficiency compared to the original cultivation equipment. We simulate two kinds of cultivation situation based on the above equipment. First, When the family of three is the simulation object, the family just needs to provide 1.76 m2 and 3.52 m2 of land area to achieve the goal of producing 50% and 100% of daily demand for vegetables (i.e. 1200 g). Also, the average production cost is about $21. Second, When Taipei is the simulation object, it can produce about 54 tons of vegetables per day in the case of that only 10% of households in Taipei can achieve the goal of producing 50% of daily demand for vegetables. Moreover, there is no transportation cost because the city becomes both places of production and consumption. The carbon footprint is low and food miles could be almost zero. Therefore, it is verified that using the cultivation equipment in this study with the proper cultivation conditions can accomplish the concept of low-carbon and eco-friendly household plant factory.