| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Hope Hui Rising, Ph.D. hope.rising@tamu.edu Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning |
| Faculty Mentor: | |
|
Meeting Times:
|
F 2:00PM -3:00PM |
|
Team Size:
|
3
|
| Open Spots: | 0 |
|
Special Opportunities:
|
Earning co-authorship on publications, or becoming a full member of my research group in the future should there be funding available
|
|
Team Needs:
|
Experience with 1) irrigation, plant germination, environmental control, and green house experiments; 2) setting up hydroponic/aeroponic system; 3) product/architectural/industrial/aerospace design and engineering; 4) prototyping using 3D modeling, digital fabrication, additive 3D manufacturing, soft robotics, and arduino; 5) signal processing in Matlab; 6) machine learning in Matlab or Python; 7) statistics software, such as SPSS, AMOS, R, or SAS; 8) writing literature review manuscripts and proposal drafts for subjects related to aeroponics, hydroponics, space habitats, atmospheric regulation, microclimate design, and monitoring of plant germination and growth |
|
Description:
|
The proposed research intends to prototype soil-less and soil-based blue-green infrastructure prototypes as building blocks of closed-loop life support systems that simulate self-regulating Earth-based environments in the outer space. By hybridizing hydroponic and aeroponic systems, four prototypes (green, blue, blue-green, and green-blue prototypes) will be optimized for germinating and growing edible plants with nutrient water or mist. The building block prototypes will be used for the larger transit and planetary space habitats to be developed by a concurrent Innovation X project entitled “Prototyping Blue-Green Infrastructure as Complex Adaptive Systems for Space Habitats.” For each prototype unit, germination fabrics will be set on top of a perforated panel that subdivides a closed-loop enclosure into an upper plant chamber and a lower root chamber where mushrooms will also be grown to produce ongoing nutrient solutions for the irrigation system. Additional small chambers along the perimeters of the enclosure will be used for porous materials that will help absorb and desorb specific gases required by and produced by plants. Sensors will be used to control robotic arms to help regulate specific gases, relative humidity level, and temperature within the root chamber, the plant chamber, and outside of the enclosure. Experiments will be conducted in a greenhouse within set ranges of humidity, temperature, and light exposure (to simulate typical climatic conditions) and in plant growth chambers with temperature, moisture, and light controls (to simulate extreme climatic conditions). |