Conceptualization of Unified Automation Architecture for Photovoltaic based Greenhouse

Abstract

Greenhouse (GH) internal environmental parameters like temperature, humidity, ventilation, irrigation, fertigation, and photosynthesis are non-linear and have high interdependencies. A low cost yet efficient automation architecture is highly desirable for GH applications to reduce the farming dependencies on external atmospheric conditions and rain. The proposed integrated automated photovoltaic greenhouse (PV-GH) work is divided into four parts: (1) conceptualization of the automation architecture; (2) design and demonstration; (3) electrical energy performance analysis; (4) validation through crop yield analysis. In this paper, a unified automation architecture for PV -GH is proposed considering temperature, humidity, ventilation, irrigation, fertigation, and photosynthesis control and monitoring in an integrated manner. The presented conceptualization of automation architecture (the first part of the proposed work) for a standalone PV -GH is simple in nature and execution, however, it is effective and low cost. Besides maintaining the required environmental conditions within PV -GH internal environment, the proposed automation architecture also reduces the amount of water required for irrigation and increases the effective photosynthesis duration by four hours per day. Microcontroller ATmega 2560 hardware-based coordinated, unified control and monitoring architecture is developed to manage the PV-GH internal parameters within defined boundary conditions.