Ph.D. Student Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York
Body of Abstract: Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) research aims to make growing plants in the built environment more efficient, hardier, and more appealing to consumers than traditional open-field agriculture, but vertical farming has a much larger carbon footprint than open-field agriculture, with electric lighting accounting for two-thirds of energy use. There are many use-cases, however, where CEA may be necessary to feed the local population, including in remote locations and in areas where climate-related plant stressors inhibit outdoor crop growth. In addition, CEA use-cases often have strict energy availability. With electric lighting being the highest energy user in CEA, there exists the largest opportunity for energy use reduction.
Horticultural lighting quantity and quality is incredibly important to a plant’s ability to thrive, but delivery of too little or too much light and degraded spectral quality can cause plant stress responses and morphological changes., The goal of a CEA environment’s lighting system then is to use the least amount of light (and therefore energy) possible to achieve the desired growth outcomes. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) can be spectrally tuned, allowing for finer control of spectrum-based photomorphogenesis and increased spectral efficacy of fixtures, and they allow for easier regulation of light intensity. However, spectral tuning, especially short-term time-based spectral changes, and pulsed lighting (on the order of kilohertz) have been demonstrated to be opportunities for further LED grow-light optimization but are understudied. My thesis research focuses on these two optimization opportunities using Tunable Irradiance Growth Efficacy Research (TIGER) Lights, created by our lab, which are color, intensity, and pulsing tunable, and allow for a wide variety of lighting recipes to be rendered to the experiment plant, and on novel plant sensors, especially plant electrophysiology sensors.