Structure and Misting Subsystem Design of Automated Aeroponic System for Lactuca sativa Production

Agriculture has been known as the science of crop cultivation and its main objective is to sustain the generation of food and other products for human consumption. However, climate change imposes a great challenge in agriculture especially in the Philippines that results to lower growth rates. To address the challenge, one way is to utilize new and revolutionary techniques in farming such as aeroponics. It has been popular due to its various advantages of soilless cultivation where plants are either grown on nutrient-rich water solutions or through misting, smaller space requirement, and its capability reduces the water and fertilizer usage by 80% and 60% respectively. With that, this study developed an autonomous aeroponics system that concentrates on misting system on lettuce (Lactuca sativa) plant in an indoor set-up. Furthermore, the consideration in the structure design of the system was an efficient and ergonomically optimized structure in the form of desk table to fit in an indoor environment without interrupting the basic household flow and can also be used for other purposes. The structure was designed to accommodate up to 12 individual set of plants in its growing chamber and considers different factors that can affect the growth of the plant. Furthermore, this study will also focus on the automation of the misting system of an indoor aeroponics that incorporates to the misting time and interval, water, pH level, and water and nutrients solutions parameters. Based on the testing results performed, minor discrepancies are acquainted by different factors such as the delay introduce by the Arduino and the inconsistencies given by the components installed but none of which has affects the performance of the whole system greatly. Thus, the automatic misting subsystem of an aeroponics system works in accordance with the system flow using Arduino Mega as its main controller.