Increasing the yield of Lactuca sativa, L. in glass greenhouses through illumination spectral filtering and development of an optical thin film filter

Authors

Jacqualine Anne Thomas, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Mikhail Vasiliev, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Mohammad Nur-E-Alam, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Kamal Alameh, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow

Author Identifier

Jacqualine Thomas
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7058-4687

Mikhail Vasiliev
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7669-1782

Mohammad Nur-E-Alam
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1969-3348

Kamal Alameh
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5260-0137

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Sustainability

Publisher

MDPI

School

Electron Science Research Institute / School of Science

RAS ID

31537

Funders

Edith Cowan University - Open Access Support Scheme 2020

Comments

Thomas, J. A., Vasiliev, M., & Alameh, K. (2020). Increasing the Yield of Lactuca sativa, L. in Glass Greenhouses through Illumination Spectral Filtering and Development of an Optical Thin Film Filter. Sustainability, 12(9), 3740. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093740

Abstract

With the increase in world population, the continued advances in modern greenhouse agriculture and plant growth practices are expected to help overcome the global problem of future food shortages. The next generation greenhouse design practices will need to address a range of issues, ranging from energy and land use efficiency to providing plant-optimized growth techniques. In this paper, we focus on investigating the optimum irradiation spectra matched to the lettuce species (Lactuca sativa, L.), commonly grown in greenhouse environments, in order to develop low-emissivity glass panes that maximize the biomass productivity of glass greenhouses. This low-emissivity glass passes the solar spectral components needed for crop growth, while rejecting other unwanted radiations. This could potentially lead to significant energy savings and other beneficial effects related to greenhouse climate control, in a range of climates. The experimental results show that substantial biomass productivity improvements in lettuce (up to approximately 14.7%) can be attained by using spectrally optimized illumination, instead of white light illumination. This optimized wavelength is then demonstrated as being used to develop an advanced metal-dielectric thin-film filter that produces the optimized illumination spectrum when exposed to sunlight.

DOI

10.3390/su12093740

Related Publications

Thomas, J. A. (2020). Investigating optimum wavelength(s) for growth of Lactuca sativa, L. using tunable LED sources and developing thin-film filters for glass greenhouses. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2354

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.