Adaptive Vertical Farm for Fresh Food Production in Orbital Stations and Future Lunar Settlements

We propose an adaptive vertical farm that can be installed in orbital stations and future lunar settlements to produce fresh food for astronauts. Such an innovative greenhouse is based on the idea of progressively adapting the height of the various shelves to the growth of the plants, instead of fixing the height of the shelves to the maximum growth, as commonly done in the case of vertical farms with fixed shelves. The main advantages are the need of conditioning a reduced space as compared to fixed-shelves installations, thus resulting in a reduced energy consumption per unit of production, and the increase of the overall production owing to the possibility of installing a larger number of shelves in the same vertical space. The full efficiency of the proposed adaptive vertical farm requires an optimal scheduling of sowings, for which a mixed-integer linear programming problem is devised with the aim of maximizing the number of seedings, while fully exploiting the total height of the greenhouse. Numerical results in comparisons with a vertical farm with fixed shelves showcase the effectiveness of the proposed ideas.