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23 January 2024

How to care for a greenhouse? In city park Lužánky, they are building an autonomous watering system that will take care of it for you.

A fully autonomous solar watering system is being built in the greenhouse of the Lužánky Leisure Time Centre. It is the creation of Rastislav Straňák, a second-year student of the Master's programme Electrical Engineering Production and Management at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication of the BUT.

The student project, which focuses on sustainability, has evolved from an unassuming bachelor's thesis into implementation and application in practice: “The aim is to create an algorithm that evaluates air humidity, soil moisture and temperature based on the data received and then decides when to water and when not to water. The excess energy saved in the operation of the device will then be used to illuminate the UV light in order to speed up the development of the plants,” says Rastislav about his project. On the question of the project's origin, he adds: “My bachelor's thesis was quite an extensive job, which took me a long time to prepare and I put a lot of work into it. When the opportunity arose to implement it in a real object, like the one in Lužánky, I thought ok, why not, let's do it!”

The greenhouse is run by the Lužánky Leisure Time Centre, which focuses on organising leisure activities for all ages: “They were interested in using an unconventional way of caring for the greenhouse, which would use water mist to automatically regulate the climatic conditions of the greenhouse and thus simulate the natural tropical conditions of the plants. They also wanted the final product to be interesting for children, that's why I also implemented LED strips.”

Thanks to the collaboration, more possibilities opened up for Rastislav: “In my bachelor's thesis, I connected the individual modules. Now I am designing and testing a printed circuit board, so everything will be implemented on one complete system. The sustainable energy source is then a photovoltaic cell combined with a battery for energy storage.”

Rastislav sees the future of the project, which bears the name IRIS, as positive: “With Anna Vozárová, who is in charge of the Lužánky greenhouse, we have already discussed the possibility of offering the system to other similar facilities around the Czech Republic once it is completed. I am also going to create a market survey based on which I will try to approach selected greenhouses.”

Note: The bachelor's thesis and the current diploma thesis, under which the implementation of solar watering falls, is under the supervision of Kristýna Jandová from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Technology.

Source: Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication

Themes

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication sustainability