International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 4, Issue 5, May 2014) 563 Automated Polyhouse for Optimal Growth of Plants Tanvir Manhotra 1 , Nikhil Gaikwad 2 , Rohit Dudi 3 , Rohit Gupta 4 1,2,3,4 Department of Electronics Engineering, SAKEC, Mumbai University, India-400088 Abstract— India has vast area, but current status of agriculture management is not sufficient to provide everything to the population, which can be problematic. The solution to this issue is the practice of protected farming which includes polyhouse farming. The greenhouse covered with simple polyethylene sheet is termed as polyhouse. The function of a polyhouse is to create the optimal growing conditions for the full lifecycle of the plants. The objective of our project is to design a simple, efficient ‘programmable logic controller’ (PLC) based system for automation of polyhouse. The project features monitoring, recording and controlling the values of temperature, light intensity and soil moisture inside the polyhouse. The PLC used is a highly compact, durable and easily available. The values of temperature, light intensity and soil moisture are continuously communicated through various sensors to the PLC. Also, the system uses ‘Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition’ for real time analysis of the process. Proper design, selection, construction and the management of the polyhouse using sensors would augur well to the growth of a crop. Keywords— Light, moisture, PLC, Polyhouse, temperature I. INTRODUCTION Agriculture and allied sectors contributes 16.7% of the total GDP and provides employment to around 60% Indian population. Indian farmers face several challenges such as small land holding, poor yields due to reliance on inefficient methods of farming, too much reliance on natural phenomena such as rainfall and lack of knowledge of modern methods of agriculture. In conventional Agronomical practices, the crops are being cultivated in the open field under natural conditions where the crops are more susceptible to sudden changes in climate i.e. temperature, humidity, light intensity, photo period and other conditions due to which the quality, yield of a particular crop can get affected and may be decreased. Here the concept of protected farming comes into picture. Under protected farming, greenhouse farming is in practice from a long time. But the current system of greenhouse farming in India needs overhaul in terms of technological improvements. To fully exploit the enhanced possibilities for crop and resource management in greenhouses, it is indispensable to perform the adjustment of the control variables in an automatic way. This is because it is almost impossible for human being to understand and manipulate system with more than two dependent processes without additional aid. Hence the introduction of automatic controllers and computer- controlled greenhouses in the second half of the twentieth century was a major step forward to economically attractive crop production. Even the most basic automatic control will enhance the capacities of the greenhouse industry in emerging greenhouse areas all over the world. There is a need to find balance between the cost of investment that goes into process of cultivation and the returns obtained, at the same reducing the complexity and making the system easily accessible to farmers. One such approach is the practice of polyhouse farming, which encompasses the optimal control of greenhouse cultivation. This asset allows the grower to steer the cultivation in the desired direction. II. MATERIALS AND METHODS A polyhouse is a framed structure covered with UV stabilized low-density polythene or other transparent plastic films in which crops could be grown under controlled or partially controlled environment and which is generally large enough to permit a person to work within it to carry out cultural operations easily. It reduces dependency on rainfall and makes the optimum use of land and water resources. Polyhouse farming enables cultivation of crops that can give maximum yield on specific days and exotic crops that can’t be normally grown in Indian conditions. The polyhouse structure, used for testing the system, is designed in the form of a tunnel. The dimensions are 60cmX50cmX80cm, giving an area of 3000 sq.cm. A 70% UV stabilized polyethylene sheet is used for covering the structure. The area obtained is sufficient for the growth of 4 gerbera plants, which are used for the test. Gerbera is a 30 months crop. The first flowers are produced 7-8 weeks after plantation. The average yield is 200 flowers per sq. meter. It is the fifth most used cut flower in the world. It requires temperature in the range of 20°C-25°C, water requirement is 800ml/plant and light intensity required is around 40000 lux. The system features optimizing three parameters inside the polyhouse – temperature, light intensity, soil moisture.