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COMPARATIVE EFFICIENCIES OF HORIZONTAL VERSUS VERTICAL HYDROPONICS PLANT GROWTH SYSTEMS

My name is Charisma Jankee, currently a year 3 student at The University of the West Indies reading for BSc Mechanical Engineering with a Minor in Biosystems. The purpose of the blog is to document the economic productivity, quality, and efficiency of horizontal versus vertical hydroponic systems.

Thursday 11 November, 2021

Report was completed and the power point was made. In the night, notes were made for recording the video.

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Calculations - Average flow rate

Diameter of pipe, D = 4” = 0.1016 m R.T.F Volume flow rate Flow rate = Area × Velocity Velocity A pipe with an inner diameter of 4 inches contains water that flows at an average velocity of 2m/s Volume flow rate = A × V = 0.0081 × 2 = 0.0162 m 3 /s Converting seconds to hours Volume flow rate = 0.0162 × 3600 = 52.32 m 3 /hr

Monday 04th October, 2021

Today was hectic, so I decided to get some useful links for the project only. https://journals.utm.my/jurnalteknologi/article/view/13931 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fes3.83 https://www.hortipower.com/blogs/news/home-hydroponics-for-beginners-how-to-get-started https://constantdelights.com/post/wick-system https://www.nosoilsolutions.com/6-different-types-hydroponic-systems/ https://books.google.tt/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rwlMDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=design+and+build+of+NFT+horizontal+system&ots=f8RjGmZx58&sig=xLplOWqzwMN9NfCZo94erfwROAg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dinkar-Gaikwad/publication/346953811_Hydroponics_Cultivation_of_Crops/links/5fd3971b92851c13fe7bd7ff/Hydroponics-Cultivation-of-Crops.pdf Hoagland, D.R. and Arnon, D.I. 1938. The water culture method for growing plants without soil. California Agricultural Experiment Station Circulars, 347: 1-39

Assessment

I have been assigned the project titled "Comparative Efficiencies of Horizontal versus Vertical Hydroponics Plant Growth Systems". This project was my first choice. I choose this project because of the unavailability of soil based area where I currently reside. For my family business (Indar's Fast Food), we require a lot of leafy green plants so initially I stated to plant in oil kegs on my roof. This became difficult to maintain due to heat, hydroponics was intriguing to me since it reduces the amount of work needed to caretake for these crops and the significant difference between soilless and soil grown planting. This being said hydroponics is a totally new hobby and very excited to study. For this project, the goal is to have a better understanding of both systems and be able to obtain their efficiencies by testing under the same conditions.