Horticultural Lighting

The advent of solid state lighting has resulted in new opportunities for optimizing and regulating plant growth and biochemistry. Light is a requirement for photosynthesis and it also provides information that plants sense and use to modulate their metabolism and development to maintain photostasis in changing environments. The optimization of light use by plants and the use of remote sensing of plant signals to automate the spatial, spectral and temporal characteristics of the light environment is a major application of smart lighting. The Center is exploring new applications of advanced lighting enabled systems and services in horticultural markets and applications.

Cluster Focus

The ERC is actively engaged in research that will lead to the fusion of plant physiology with control systems engineering for the development of smart lighting systems for horticulture applications. The hydroponic unit and growth room provide the foundation for spectrally controlled growth experiments to study biomass, pigmentation, photochemistry and other physiological effects under various lighting conditions. Fundamental research efforts include lighting automation for photosynthetic organisms, integration of advanced plant fluorescence sensing techniques, dynamic lighting, and advanced control algorithms for various ambient lighting conditions in coordinated efforts with the Center’s Controls research cluster.

Research Areas

Plant Pigment Studies
Dynamic Plant Light Control
Multi – wavelength Plant Lighting
Plant Fluorescence Signal Sensing
Plant Growth Optimization
Photosynthesis Regulation

Applications

Plant Production
Vertical Farming
Greenhouse Planning
Pharmaceutical Industry

Cluster Faculty

Tessa Pocock, RPI-Lead
Robert Karlicek, RPI

Smart lighting systems applied to horticulture have significant impacts in the optimization of plant growth, the regulation of photosynthesis and the regulation of beneficial biochemical pathways, and are instrumental components of developing an automation platform for biological feedback control lighting systems.