Abstract—This paper presents the application of an automated environmental control system for a prototype greenhouse system using commercial embedded systems technology. The prototype greenhouse system was developed and instrumented with appropriate sensors to measure various environmental variables like the temperature, the light intensity, the soil moisture, the air humidity and CO2 concentration. These measurements are provided to the control algorithm which is implemented on a commercial embedded system and manipulates various actuators like, a heating and cooling actuator, fans, lights, irrigation system, and louvers in order to achieve the desired set-points, as specified by the user through a Human-Machine Interface implemented in LabView software. Certain aspects of the greenhouse dynamics have been modeled in Matlab/Simulink using nonlinear differential equations and the simulation model has been validated against experimental data, showing good agreement between the simulation and the experimental data. The purpose of this work is to enhance research related to the accurate environmental control of greenhouse systems in order to minimize energy and water consumption and to develop a robust educational platform for teaching control system design, analysis, instrumentation and embedded systems development at the Engineering School of Bahrain Polytechnic.

Index Terms—environmental control, automated greenhouse system, embedded system, temperature regulation

Cite: Christakis Papageorgiou, Ahmed Sadriwala, Mohammed Almoalem, Conor Sheedy, and Andre Hajjar, "Environmental Control of a Greenhouse System Using NI Embedded Systems Technology," Jounal of Automation and Control Engineering, Vol. 4, No. 5, pp. 331-339, October, 2016. doi: 10.18178/joace.4.5.331-339