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Strategies of Climatic Control in Greenhouses with Programmed Automatons

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  Pp. 161-167 in Proceedings of the World Congress of Computers in Agriculture and Natural Resources (13-15, March 2002, Iguacu Falls, Brazil)  701P0301.(doi:10.13031/2013.8325)
Authors:   Ingeniero Industrial Antonio Nolasco and José Basilio Nolasco
Keywords:   Equipment automation; Instrumentation and Control; Greenhouses technology; Climatic Control

The intensive agriculture in greenhouse is characterized by an agricultural production which controls to the greatest extend the biological processes involve in vegetal production. By gathering conditions, it is possible to achieve a complete control of the cultivation. This is an efficient and modern agriculture that makes use of natural resources in an intelligent an rational fashion with the objective of reaching high production, quality while being full respect with the environment.

Climatic control objective is to achieve that temperatures, relative humidity, light and CO2 is as close as possible to optimal conditions for the cultivation development. The equipments that exist in the market can control the temperature (aerometters and evaporation screens), relative humidity (nebulisators ), ventilation (zenithals) and solar radiation (thermic screens) among others. The difficulty lies in being able to manipulate all these elements in a precise way, in order to achieve the desired climate inside the greenhouse, with a minimum waste of energy and water.

A programmable automaton is an electronic device capable to control in real time sequential processes and to carry out a wide variety of logical functions such as: regulations, drips, computations, timing, etc. They have input terminals or peripherals to which sensors are connected, switches and buttons and output terminals to which it can be connected relays, electrovalves, motors, lamps, etc. As a result of this, a programmable automaton will receive an information through the sensors and will activate over the outputs a type of action in one way or another, depending of each program and the control strategy design, achieving a precise climate control and closed to the conditions that have been considered as optimal for the cultivations in each of its phases.

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