1. Introduction

Polyhouses are controlled agricultural structures designed to improve crop productivity by regulating environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, airflow, irrigation, and solar exposure. Traditional polyhouse construction often depends on generic designs that may not be optimized for local climate, soil conditions, crop requirements, or budget constraints.

This project proposes the development of an intelligent engineering tool that collects environmental and structural parameters affecting polyhouse performance and automatically generates optimized design parameters required for efficient polyhouse construction.

The system acts as a decision-support and design-assistance platform for farmers, agricultural engineers, greenhouse designers, researchers, and educational institutions.

2. Project Objective

The primary objective of this project is to develop a computational tool capable of:

  • Collecting environmental and engineering parameters affecting polyhouse design.
  • Analysing local climate and soil conditions.
  • Estimating cooling, ventilation, and structural requirements.
  • Generating optimized polyhouse design parameters.
  • Reducing trial-and-error during greenhouse planning.
  • Improving energy efficiency and crop productivity.
  • Supporting low-cost and scalable protected cultivation systems.

My first week was mainly focused on exploring and understanding the different projects currently ongoing at the ashram. These projects were very interesting and gave me exposure to a variety of real-world problems and solutions. One of the major projects was related to polyhouse temperature maintenance. Other projects included a bamboo hanger, an onion storage unit, and a grain disinfector unit.

During this period, I also learned about the various activities taking place at Vigyan Ashram and understood the work being done by its different departments. The first week was also about becoming comfortable with the environment of the ashram and getting used to its daily schedule and working culture.

At the same time, I got opportunities to interact with some startups that are being supported by Vigyan Ashram. These discussions helped me learn about innovation, problem-solving, and practical implementation of ideas.

In the second week, I started working on a modified design for the onion storage unit that would be more suitable for fabrication. I also participated in collecting polyhouse data, which was useful for identifying issues in the current polyhouse design. By the end of the week, along with other students at Vigyan Ashram, I segregated onions and analyzed the amount of spoilage that had occurred. We also gathered and documented related data for further study.

After completing the onion storage design work, I shifted my focus to the polyhouse project. The third week started with reading and understanding the work that had already been done on the polyhouse project. In previous discussions, we had identified that there was an issue with air circulation inside the polyhouse. Before solving this issue, we verified the calculations related to fan CFM and the required number of fans. We also conducted experiments to determine the effective CFM of the exhaust fan practically.