Domestic Horticultural - Centric Lighting Design

Abstract

Coloured lighting is a vital factor for plant growth, inducing both photosynthesis, phototropism and photomorphogenesis. Detailed experimental studies on the photobiology of plant have already shown the importance of creating proper lighting receipts for different species, growth and developmental stages in order to obtain a good plant productivity and nutritional quality formation.

LEDs, nowadays, are a good tool for creating the proper lighting receipts composed by different narrow spectral power distribution combined for specific plants. Small dimension, long operating lifetime, great efficiency, digitally controllable features and optically controllable performances are also useful aspects for plants’ lighting system development not only for laboratorial research experimentation, for aero- spatial and industrial food production but also in other filed such as domestic applications.

In this domain, the research aimed at defining requirements and features of a lighting fixture for food growing that could be prototyped in an easy and economical way. The requirements were derived firstly from a scientific literature review about agriculture and food science in order to define the preferred characteristics of lighting for food growing in terms of quantity, spectral power distribution, spatial distribution, direction, temporal distribution. More than this a a qualitative survey was performed in order to derive further product’ specifications in terms of end-users’ interests in the functionalities, dimensions, price and interface features of the system.

Finally, the solutions were further developed in two prototypes that meet the following requirements: mixing between the different channels, ability to create relations of flow between the channels, the overall dimensions. The prototypes were meant as design probes for evaluating the usability and the impact of the product before proceeding to the detailed design.