Modeling of environmental climates inside naturally ventilated tropical greenhouse

Abstract

Traditional open planting problems such as unpredictable weather and crucial diseases and pest need an alternative method in plantation such as greenhouse system and monitoring system. However, due to high initial cost to those technologies, the related parameters for optimum growth o f plantation need to be monitored. Wireless monitoring system is one of the technologies currently applied in agriculture to, save labor costs, improve the quality and increase yields. This study describes the component for wireless monitoring system developed for chili (capsicum) plantation focusing on two monitoring systems namely environmental climate monitoring system and fertigation monitoring system. Each section includes two parts, which are the hardware and the software parts. The hardware part involves the implementation of the wireless hardware and sensors. The wireless components used in this project are NI Wi-Fi DAQ device that uses IEEE 802.11 b/g standards. A few sensors are used to monitor the greenhouse climate variables and fertigation system such as temperature sensor, humidity sensor, illuminance sensor, wind speed sensor for climates monitoring system and soil water potential sensor for fertigation monitoring system. All the sensors involved are connected to the NI Wi-Fi DAQ device that transmit the sensors reading to the user computer through wireless connection for data collection, data logging and data analysis using Lab VIEW Signal Express software. The collected data was evaluated and analyzed from the software and mathematical models of NVTG using System Identification were also developed. The experimental results show that the proposed monitoring system can be applied for future applications of precision agriculture. It is validated that the transmission error range between the wireless with wired connection is only 3%. It is hoped that developed wireless monitoring system will help farmers to monitor their plant and consequently, remote control strategy could later be implemented to the plantation.