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Development of Automated Monitoring System for Hydroponics Vertical

Farming
To cite this article: G W Michael et al 2021 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 1844 012024

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2020 2nd International Conference on Science & Technology (2020 2nd ICoST) IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1844 (2021) 012024 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1844/1/012024

Development of Automated Monitoring System for

Hydroponics Vertical Farming

G W Michael1, F S Tay1* and Y L Then1

1
Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Science, Swinburne University of Technology,
Sarawak Campus. Jalan Simpang Tiga, 93350 Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia

Email: fstay@swinburne.edu.my*

Abstract. Proposed is an automated monitoring system for hydroponics vertical farming. This
project aims to design and develop an automated system to monitor and maintain the level of
nutrition solution for the vertical farming process. The monitoring condition includes Electrical
Conductivity (EC), pH value, the liquid level as well as the water temperature of the nutrient
solution stored in the rectangular PVC. Instead of using soil as the growing medium, the project
used hydroponics method to grow the leafy vegetables, Bok Choy. The data monitored will be
sent and processed by Arduino Mega microcontroller and upload to Ubidots Cloud using the
ESP8266 NodeMCU. The system also provides control function to maintain the nutrient level
and amount of solution flows into each layer of vegetables. It is expected that the implemented
system would reduce the water and electrical consumption and allows the growth of the plant to
be supervised from time to time without having a person to look after.

1. Introduction
The world’s population is expected to increase by another 2 billion people by the year of 2050 and
eventually it will lead to a bigger challenge, feeding more people with limited lands [1]. Vertical farming
was considered to be one of the latest technologies in agriculture field to reduce the land used issue. It
is a practice of growing plants and vegetables on vertically inclined surfaces. This method of planting
produces foods in vertically stacked layers instead of farming vegetables or foods on a single level. This
type of farming method results in more crops production within the same square footage of growing
area [2].
Even so, monitoring process is essential in vertical farming process as it helps to monitor the
amount of nutrients provided to the plants. However, the expenses needed for the application of
advanced technologies for vertical farming are way too costly which include the buildings or
greenhouses for the plants, the lighting system and monitoring system of the vertical farm. Therefore,
this research proposed a solution by implementing an automated monitoring system for vertical farming
using hydroponics method. Aside from monitoring the nutrient solution, the proposed solution will
minimize the use of electricity and water when growing the Bok Choy plants.
This research project aims to develop an automated monitoring system for vertical farming that
is able to monitor the condition of nutrient solution and utilizes the least amount of electricity and water
to produce vegetables.

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2020 2nd International Conference on Science & Technology (2020 2nd ICoST) IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1844 (2021) 012024 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1844/1/012024

2. Literature Review
2.1 Hydroponics Vertical Farming System
Hydroponics is one of the vertical farming techniques that uses nutrient solution as the growing medium
to cultivate some of the plants and leafy vegetables [3]. The reason of using nutrition liquid rather than
soil is because it can help to avoid a lot of problems such as soil borne diseases and cutworm that may
affect the plants and ruin the crops.

2.1.1 Nutrient Film Technique System

This method of hydroponics system consists of continuous movement of nutrient solution. Due to its
continuous operation, no timer is needed for the water pump as the pump will run continuously for whole
day. This method allows the nutrient solution to flow over the roots of the plants and then drains back
into the reservoir again. NFT system save more cost as it does not require any growing medium other
than air. The downside for this system is that the roots will dry out very quickly is the flow of nutrient
solution is interrupted.

2.1.2 Ebb and Flow System

This farming method was also known as flood and drain as it works by flooding the grow tray with
nutrient solution for a period of time before draining back into the reservoir. It is commonly done with
a submerged water pump that is connected to a timer. The timer will be triggered when the nutrient
solution starts to flood the tray, then eventually flows back after the timer is shut off. The entire system
cannot be interrupted as it will cause the roots of the plants to dry out if the nutrient solution stops
flowing into the growing tray.

2.2 Key measurement for monitoring process

In fact, there are many key measurements need to be considered for the monitoring process such as
electrical conductivity, pH, dissolved oxygen, carbon dioxide, growing light intensity and others.
However, some of the most critical measurements were selected and focused for the implementation of
monitoring system.

2.2.1 Electrical Conductivity (EC)

Some studies stated that EC is the most favored method of ion measurement because it can measure the
electrically charged nutrient ions in a solution the unit for EC is in Siemens (S). The measurement of
EC in hydroponics is essential in hydroponics system because it can determine the amount of mineral
salts dissolved in the nutrient solution [4]. As the nutrients for hydroponic plants are primarily composed
of mineral salts, the total amount of nutrients in solution can be determined precisely by measuring the
EC level of the solution [5]. By getting the EC values from the sensor, the EC level in the nutrient
solution can be adjusted by either adding water to lower the EC value or increase the concentration of
nutrient solution to increase its EC level. The optimum range for the EC of most nutrient solution is
between 0-1.6 depends on the growing stage.

2.2.2 Power of Hydrogen (pH)

pH level is important in a hydroponics system because it will significantly impact on plant health. Study
stated that the ideal range for hydroponics plant is between 5.8 - 6.2. The nutrient solution for
hydroponics system cannot be too acidic because it will case the plants to die. In fact, there are different
ways of adjusting the pH value. One of the ways includes using pH up and down solution to control the
pH level. Another way is using household item such as white vinegar or citric acid to lower down the
pH value and baking soda to increase its value. In this project, pH down solution is used to lower down
the pH level of the nutrient solution.

2.3 Previous Existing Project

2.3.1 West America Autonomous farm
This farm located in San Carlo, California and the name of the company is called Iron Ox. This company
was the first to create fully automated farm and the farm is partially monitored by robotics and software
implementation. With the combination of robotics arms, self-driving movers, the company is able to run

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2020 2nd International Conference on Science & Technology (2020 2nd ICoST) IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1844 (2021) 012024 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1844/1/012024

most of the process automatically. The sensory system implemented in the system will monitor the
condition of the plants and the growing stage to determine the time to harvest.

2.3.2 Japan’s Robot-Farm

Spread Co. Ltd is the world’s largest automated vertical farm located in Kyoto, Japan. The automated
cultivation system developed by the company is able to produce up to 30,000 heads of lettuce every day.
Different technologies were invented such as automated cultivation system, environmental monitoring
technologies, water recycling and specialized LED lighting for different plants. This automated system
greatly reduced the number of workers needed for the monitoring process. According to the company,
minimizing the number of workers can also minimize the risk of bacterial growth and in turns enhancing
the hygienic conditions to secure high-quality production.

3. Methodology

3.1 Hardware Mechanical Design and Setup

Figure 1. Overall SolidWorks Design

Figure 1 shows the design of the hardware setup using SolidWorks software. It consists of three levels:
one layer for the reservoirs and another two layers for the rectangular PVCs for the vertical farming.
The bottom level consists of two reservoirs, one for the clean nutrient solution and the other reservoir
was for the used nutrient solution drained back from the rectangular PVC. It also consists of a small
water filter connected between two reservoirs to filter the used nutrient solution and flow back into the
reservoir with clean nutrient solution. Three sensors were placed in the reservoir include EC, pH and
temperature sensor to constantly measure the nutrient level, pH level and water temperature in the
reservoir. Hence, there will also be two small nutrient pumps to pump the concentrated A & B nutrient
into the reservoir for nutrition adjustment. On the second and third layer, four sensors were placed along
each rectangular PVC. Ultrasonic sensor was placed at the edge PVC pipe to detect the nutrient solution
level in the PVC pipe. The EC sensor, temperature sensor and pH sensor were located in the middle of
the PVC pipe to measure the EC, temperature and pH value.

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2020 2nd International Conference on Science & Technology (2020 2nd ICoST) IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1844 (2021) 012024 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1844/1/012024

3.2 Electronic Design

Figure 2. Overall monitoring system setup

Figure 2 shows the overall system setup for the monitoring process [6,7]. The project used Arduino
Mega due to more analog pin required for the sensory system. For data logging process, NodeMCU was
selected to send all the monitored data to Ubidots cloud. The project used MQTT protocol to
communicate between devices (M2M) and the data will be converted to JSON format so that the system
can make post request to the Ubidots cloud server with the NodeMCU. As mentioned above, four
sensors were used for the entire system except ultrasonic sensors were just to measure the nutrient
solution level in the rectangular PVC. To control the water flows in the PVC, an electrical motorized
valve was used.
3.3 System Flow Control

Figure 3. Main System Flow Diagram

Figure 3 shows the overall monitoring process and control system. There are also three sub-processes
to check the nutrient conditions in the reservoir and rectangular PVCs. The system started off by
measuring the nutrient solution level in the rectangular PVCs. Then it will carry out other process when
the requirements were not met. From the flowchart above, the red in colour sub process will be triggered
if there is no enough nutrient solution in the top layer PVC. It will first check the nutrient condition in
the reservoir before pumping up into the top layer PVC. This is to ensure that the amount of nutrient

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2020 2nd International Conference on Science & Technology (2020 2nd ICoST) IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1844 (2021) 012024 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1844/1/012024

solution pumped in has enough amount of nutrient level in it. For second layer, it will set the top ball
valve to open so that the nutrient solution in top layers will flow down to the second layer. After the
water is being pumped up, it will re-measure again the amount of nutrient solution in the rectangular
PVC. The blue in colour sub-processes will measure the nutrient condition in the rectangular PVC and
ready to replace new nutrient solution if the nutrient condition is not in the optimum range.

4. Result and Discussion

4.1 Hardware Implementation

Figure 4. Hardware Implementation

Figure 4 shows the hardware implementation for the monitoring system. The blue in color reservoir was
used to store clean nutrient solution while the red in color reservoir stored the drained nutrient solution.
As shown in the figure above, the A&B solution is controlled by two small water pumps to control the
amount of nutrient in the reservoir. All the electrical components connection will be placed in a case
instead the floor to prevent in contact with water. Two motorized ball valves were connected between
the rectangular PVCs and the reservoir using 90° elbow, socket and short pipe.

4.2 EC sensor verification

To ensure that the DIY sensor developed has accurate measurement as the TDS meter. A comparison
had been made to compare the result:

Table 1. Comparison between TDS meter and DIY EC sensor

EC (ppm) Temperature(o)
TDS & EC meter (in clear water) 48 15.2
DIY EC & temperature sensor (in clear water) 49 15.06
TDS & EC meter (nutrient solution in reservoir) 1429 28.9
DIY EC & temperature sensor (nutrient solution 1383 25
in reservoir)

The percentage error between the measured value from DIY EC sensor and TDS meter is calculated
to be 3.22% which is quite small in error percentage.

4.3 Control system output

The entire process takes about 2 minutes to completely fill up both layers of rectangular PVCs. This is
due to the high-powered water pump used in the system reduce the time taken for the process. The
output power can be adjusted so that the flow rate will not be overly fast. The maximum flow rate that

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2020 2nd International Conference on Science & Technology (2020 2nd ICoST) IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1844 (2021) 012024 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1844/1/012024

the pump can reach is up to 1200L/hour. However, the power is adjusted to the minimum for testing the
flow rate due to safety consideration. The final calculated flow rate output from the water pump is
221.22L/hour which is about 20% of the maximum output power. The time taken for the water to
drained back from the two rectangular PVCs is much slower due to the gentle slope of the rectangle
PVC. The reason placing it this way is to allow the water to flow back to the reservoir with the force of
gravity. When the electrical motorized valve opened, the water will use the slope and the help of gravity
force to drain downwards.
Calculation for the flow rate of the submersible water pump:
Total volume required for both regular PVCs = 2[100cm(length)×10.16cm(width)× 3.53c(height)]
= 7374cm3/ 7.374 liter
Flow rate of the water pump = 7.374L/2 minutes
= 221.22L/hour
4.4 Electrical energy Consumption
The electronic components that consumed electrical energy include growing light, water pumps,
nutrient pumps, air pumps and electrical motorized ball valves. The calculated electrical consumption
is compared between the current implemented monitoring vertical farming system and NFT system.
The formula used to calculate electrical energy consumption is shown below:
Electrical consumption for NFT system (per day)
(  ℎ ) = × (ℎ/)/ 1000(/) = 14 × (8ℎ/)/1000(/) = 0.112ℎ
( − 6612  ) = (18 × 20%) × 24/1000 = 0.0864ℎ
( − 6618  ) = (22 × 20%) × 24/1000 = 0.1056ℎ
(2 ×  ) = [(2.5) × 24/1000] × 2 = 0.12ℎ
(     ) = (0) × 24/1000 = 0ℎ
Total Electrical consumption = 0.424kWh per day.
Electrical consumption for current monitoring system (per day)
(  ℎ ) = 14 × (8ℎ/)/1000(/) = 0.112ℎ
( − 6612  ) = (18 × 20%) × 3.2/1000 = 0.01152ℎ
( − 6618  ) = (22 × 20%) × 3.2/1000 = 0.01408ℎ
(2 ×  ) = [(2.5) × 24/1000] × 2 = 0.12ℎ (     ) = (5) × 0.8/1000 =
0.004ℎ
Total Electrical consumption = 0.2616kWh per day
From the calculation above, it was concluded that the current monitoring system consumed less energy
compare to NFT system.
4.5 Plants growth from different stages
Throughout the project, there were two types of growing stages to grow Bok Choy plant. One of
them is growing the Bok Choy plant from seed and the other method is directly growing them from
stalk. The experiment was carried out on the current farming system and observed for 7 days:

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2020 2nd International Conference on Science & Technology (2020 2nd ICoST) IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1844 (2021) 012024 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1844/1/012024

Table 2. Comparison between growing from seed and stalk

4.6 Data Monitoring Process

Figure 5. Ubidots dashboards (left) and pH reading measurement (right)

Figure 5 shows the Ubidots dashboard and the measured pH value. The main benefits of using Ubidots
cloud was because it provides better GUI in data visualising and will automatically draw the data to
graph instead of assigning them manually. The pH value varies a lot due to the initially and slowly
stabilised after a period of time which falls within the optimum range between 5.9 - 6.2. From the figures
above, only pH value and temperature sensor value were able to send to cloud. This is due to the parsing
error when trying to make a post request contains JSON data from three DIY EC sensors.
4.7 Limitation of the proposed monitoring system
Time constraint is important in this project, it takes quite long time to wait for the plants to grow and
the people need to perform the observation every day. Therefore, the lack of daily observation caused
the process of the plants growth to slow down.
Aside from that, maintaining the plants growth was also one of the main constraints of the project. This
is due to the lack of taking care of the plants’ condition daily and causing them to die without realizing.
The farming method is one of the reasons of hard to maintain the plants growth. Soil cultivation was
able to secure the nutrient than the hydroponics and also able to prevent the plants from overheating.
During the germination stage, the worker placed the seedlings under the sun increase the growing rate
but overheated water eventually caused the plants to die. Hence, extensive care was required to ensure
that the plant is able to grow healthily.
4.8 Significance of this research
Even though vertical farming system was commonly used in many places but most of them were still
using the traditional vertical farming methods or taking care of the plants under the human’s supervision.
With the automated monitoring system implemented to the system, it can help the people to monitor the
nutrient condition without measuring the nutrient condition by hand. The control system implemented
also reduced the time taken needed change the nutrient solution. As compared above between the NFT
system and the implemented monitoring system, the implemented monitoring system consumed less
electrical energy than the NFT system and it can also reduce the frequency of water replacement which
achieve the objectives of this project. The monitored data can be used for future studies and
improvements so that the people can used the previous existing data as references to see what else can
be improvised.

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2020 2nd International Conference on Science & Technology (2020 2nd ICoST) IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1844 (2021) 012024 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1844/1/012024

5. Conclusion and Recommendation

To conclude, an automated monitoring vertical farming system was developed successfully to minimize
the workload of the farmers. The monitored data was used in the control system to ensure that the best
quality of nutrient solution was supplied to the Bok Choy plant. The data monitored was sent to the
Ubidots cloud platform for data logging process and also for future studies.
Based on the result above, the NFT system had the electrical consumption of 0.424kWh while
the implemented monitoring system consumed 0.2616kWh. Therefore, it was concluded that the
monitoring system consume less energy than traditional vertical hydroponics farming system which
increase the overall efficiency of the monitoring process.
First of all, the mechanical design of the monitoring system can be improvised. From the
proposed design above, there is a lot of downside for the project such as the way of the nutrient solution
drained back. As mentioned earlier, the downside of this vertical farming system is when more layers
of plants are implemented in the future, it will consume more water as the nutrient solution only has
one way to drained back to the reservoir which is through the bottom layer. If top layers require change
of nutrient solution, the entire layers will have to change at the same time because the water only have
one exit to flow back to the reservoir. The system will only save more water when bottom layers require
nutrient solution replacement because they can be replaced by the nutrient solution from upper layers.
Aside from that, relocating the clean reservoir to the top part of the entire system allows the nutrient
solution to flow into the rectangular PVC using the force of gravity. Instead of using water pump, a ball
valve will be good enough to control the flow of the nutrient solution. With this design, the system can
reduce the number of water pumps used for the system.
Aside from the mechanical design, other key measurements can be considered and add into the
monitoring process such as carbon dioxide, light intensity and dissolve oxygen level. The monitoring
system needs to be all around to make sure that the plants can grow healthily.

6. References
[1] Kalantari F., Tahir O. M., Joni R. A., and Fatemi E. 2018, Opportunities and challenges in
sustainability of vertical farming: A review, J. Landsc. Ecol. Republic).
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[Online]. Available: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-you- should-know-about-vertical-
farming-4144786. [Accessed: 26-May-2019].
[3] Benke K. and Tomkins B. 2017, “Future food-production systems: Vertical farming and controlled-
environment agriculture,” Sustain. Sci. Pract. Policy.
[4] Ashley, “Electrical Conductivity and hydroponic gardening,” FifthSeasonGardening, 2015.
[Online]. Available: https://fifthseasongardening.com/electrical- conductivity-and-hydroponic-
gardening. [Accessed: 21-May-2019].
[5] Bugbee B. 2019, “284 Towards Efficient Nutrient Management in Recirculating Hydroponic
Culture,” HortScience, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 491C – 491.
[6] Then Y. L., You K. Y., and Dimon M. N. 2014, “Soil Moisture Dielectric Measurement Using
Microwave Sensor System”, 2014 International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation
Conference Proceedings, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, pp. 97-98.
[7] Tan W. Y, Then Y. L., Lew Y. L., and Tay F. S 2019, “ Newly Calibrated Analytical Models for
Soil Moisture Content and pH Value by Low-Cost YL-69 Hygrometer Sensor”, Measurement,
pp. 166-178.