Automated PAR for Additional Photosynthesis in PV Based Protective Environment Controlled Farming Systems

Protective environment-controlled farming (PECF) technology enables quality production of desired crop and yield is independent of atmospheric conditions. Thus, PECF is a promising technology for agro-sectors to meet the global food demand. Photosynthesis is a major parameter that affects crop yield production in PECF systems. PECF systems generally consist of artificial lighting which creates photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) to ensure required photosynthesis. The duration of the photosynthesis process could be optimized to maximize the crop yield. In this paper creation of automated PAR LED light for photovoltaic-based PECF (PV_PECF) system and its real-field experimental demonstration for one full crop cycle is presented. The proposed automated PAR LED lighting system utilizes early dawn and post dusk time to increase the effective photosynthesis duration by 4 hours over 24 hours duration. The performance of the proposed automated PAR creation is experimentally demonstrated for 97 days for a tomato crop under the PV_PECF system. Specific leaf area (SLA) is used as an indicator to compare the performance of the proposed methodology with open land farming. The SLA and leaf weight values are found 11.49% and 13%, respectively higher for the PV_PECF system as compared to the crop yield from open land farming.