Laboratory Scale Plant Factory Artificial Light: Primary Evaluation of the Light Environment, Resources Consumption and Yields

Abstract

Plant factory artificial light (PEAL) is an attractive technology for producing high-value plants and medical-grade herbs. The PFAL research and development in Thailand are in their early stages. This article aims to design and construct the lab-scale PFAL, which includes several key features such as the lighting quality, the controls of the environment, and the embedded technology monitoring system. The lab-scale PEAL must evaluate the preliminary results of the artificial light parameters, resources consumption, the plant production yield, and the correlation between LED artificial light and the plant yields. The results demonstrated that our lab-scale PFAL consists of 27 m3 cultivation volumes. White-LED T8 (4091K) artificial light emitted, on average, the PPFD of 187±23 µmol m-2 s-1 with an R:B ratio of 1.8. The lettuce production yields show a strong positive correlation with the PPFD. The lettuce production yield is 76.23 g plant-1 under the temperature of 24.05℃, RH of 79.3%, and 923 ppm of CO2 concentration with a light period of 16/8 h. The PC-based monitoring and data acquisition control worked well during the crop experiments. The environmental parameters indicated that the results did not differ from the other PFALs. Electrical energy consumption data were also reasonable at 45%, 37%, and 17% of LED artificial light, air condition units, and other types of equipment, respectively. The artificial light sources have to improve the light uniformity and increase intensity. The lab-scale PFAL is very helpful in developing students’ skills in education and disseminating the knowledge and technical design of our PFAL to academic services. For future studies, efforts will be put in developing this PFAL to achieve higher productivity by balancing the resources consumption with the cloud-based control and monitor system.