Greenhouse Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

Greenhouses are one of the most technologically complex agricultural production systems today. Protected cultivations have been spreading over the past 50 years across all geographical areas of the planet. Greenhouses allow growing multiple types of plants in climatic zones that are naturally unfit for their development. The main objective of the use of greenhouses is to modify the climatic conditions available outdoors (light, temperature, humidity, CO₂ concentration and air speed) to create a more suitable environment for crop development inside. In addition, the development of crops within an enclosed space allows controlling the entry of pests and the exit of beneficial auxiliary insects. The main drawback of greenhouses is the need for high energy use when outside environmental conditions are adverse (excessive cold or heat). Other disadvantages are the high economic investment that they often need (with respect to crops in an open field) and the generation of waste, mainly plastic materials. Great advantages of their use include the ability to increase crop production and, consequently, improve efficiency in the use of limited resources such as agricultural land and water. Growing methods or climate control techniques used inside greenhouses are beginning to be applied in other systems such as plant factories, plant covers for green roofs or green walls, vegetation inside buildings in urban areas or plant growth activities in space, and these uses will increase in the future.

Greenhouse cultivation supposes numerous technological challenges, many of them common to all agricultural systems, and others specific to this productive model. The solutions that engineering provides in the development of greenhouses cover a large number of fields. The most important are the design of greenhouse structures and plant factories, development of new covering materials, climate control and modelling, crop modelling and management, lighting technology, energy saving techniques and use of renewable energies, control of irrigation and growing medium, design and use of sensors, automation and robotics, or computational fluid dynamic and heat transfer modelling.

Prof. Francisco Domingo Molina Aiz
Guest Editor

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• greenhouse
• horticulture
• climate control
• sensors
• energy sustainability
• crop modelling
• plant protection
• insect pest management
• water
• soil