WECO2 Park Demo Facility
A Demonstration Park where Clean Technologies combine to produce Bioenergy, Biofood, Biofibers, Biochemicals from recycled materials.
Greenhouse Research Center
AR3C has designed and commissioned an advanced research-only indoor horticulture greenhouse facility to support research and development and associated experimental phase trials. The greenhouse is configured with 12 compartmentalized and segregated zones with individual subsystem attribute setting controls. These include electrical/lighting, ventilation, shading, heating, irrigation, advanced data acquisition, monitoring and automation. Each zone measures 60’ (18.3m) X 25’ (7.6m) with a gutter height of 23’ (7.0m). Furthermore, the facility is designed to accommodate experimentation activities and cultivation trial requirements where alternative crop layout configurations, lighting and crop density variables can be quickly and easily modified to suit the needs of the experiments.
Environmental conditions can be produced for a wide range of plant climate combinations with variable modification capabilities to replicate desired microclimate states to suit the requirements of a wide range of research projects.
The facility design and implementation is energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable. All energy inputs are generated from recovered post-agriculture use biomass materials and post-experiment crop remnant materials are recycled and re-purposed to prevent transfer to landfills.
Below are further facility details:
The growing environment characteristics of each of the 12 greenhouse growing bays is controlled by a fully automated and state-of-the art programmable climate control system.
The system controls:
- Heating
- Cooling
- Venting
- Fertigation
- CO2 dosing
- Lighting
- Water Treatment and Recirculation
The greenhouse utilizes suspended and floor supported gutter crop support troughs that:
- Provides a support surface the plants and growth media substrates above the floor of the greenhouse.
- Provides a gutter pathway for irrigation water to be collected, treated and recirculated.
- Allows for a broad array of options for configuration of multiple trough heights, crop density & lighting configuration for each greenhouse crop bay.
An advanced hybrid heating system is utilized at the greenhouse facility where heat water is created in a boiler array that is uses syn-gas fuel produced at that site by a gasification process using bio-mass. In addition, heat energy is also supplemented with recovered heat form other facility processes such as drying and gasification.
Features of the heating system include:
- Heat distribution to crop areas via primary floor-mounted pipes & secondary localized inter-foliar grow pipes
- Individual control of each crop growing bay heat application
- Boiler fuel is syn-gas
- Heating is supplemented by recaptured heat from other facility processes
- Expansion tanks
A wide array of supplemental lighting options can be installed in each compartmentalized zone.
Potential lighting options can include individual or hybridized systems including:
- High Pressure Sodium
- Metal Halide
- Fluorescent
- LED
