Optimizing Greenhouse Design with Miniature Models and IoT (Internet of Things) Technology—A Real-Time Monitoring Approach

Abstract

The market for smart greenhouses has been valued at USD 1.77 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow to 3.39 billion by 2030. In order to make this more efficient, with the help of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, it is desired to eliminate the problem of traditional agriculture, which has poor monitoring and accuracy control of the parameters of a culture. Climate control decisions in a greenhouse are made based on parameter monitoring systems, which can be remotely controlled. Instead of this adjustment of the measured parameters, it would be preferable from the point of view of energy consumption that they should be calculated at optimal values from the design phase of the greenhouse. For this reason, it would be better to perform an energy simulation of the greenhouse first. For the study carried out in this work, a small greenhouse (mini-greenhouse) was built. It was equipped with an IoT sensor system, which measured indoor climate parameters and could send data to the cloud for future recording and processing. A simplified mathematical model of the heat balance was established, and the measured internal parameters of the mini-greenhouse were compared with those obtained from the simulation. After validating the mathematical model of the mini-greenhouse, this paper aimed to find the optimal position for placing a normal-sized greenhouse. For this, several possible locations and orientations of the greenhouse were compared by running the mathematical model, with which the most unfavorable positions could be eliminated. Then, some considerably cheaper “mini-greenhouses” were made and placed in the locations with the desired orientations. Using sensor systems and technologies similar to those presented in this work, the parameters from all mini-greenhouses can be monitored in real time. This real-time monitoring allows for the simultaneous analysis of all greenhouses, without the disadvantages of data collection directly in the field, with all data being recorded in the cloud and other IoT-specific advantages being made use of. In the end, we can choose the optimal solution for the location of a real-size greenhouse.