NEWS RELEASE

Editor’s note: Links to video and high-resolution images for download appear at the end of this release.

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Mike Williams
713-348-6728
mikewilliams@rice.edu

Down on the farm … in your apartment

Rice University seniors design vegetable greenhouse scaled to city dwellers

HOUSTON – (May 10, 2018) – Vegetables are part of a healthy diet, but urban apartment dwellers in some places around the world don’t have regular access to them. A group of Rice University senior engineering students set out to remedy that for their capstone design project.

Team Växthus — mechanical engineering students Mary Bao, Mike Hua, Jack Kaplan, Harrison Lin and Colin Losey and electrical engineering student Lingbo Chen – has developed an automated, modular, indoor greenhouse to provide high-throughput food growth aimed at young professionals in urban settings.

“This allows them to grow fresh produce, everything from leafy greens to herbs to root vegetables,” Lin said.

Växthus (Swedish for greenhouse) was developed for the HSB Living Lab at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. The lab is a residential community of 29 apartments for students and visiting researchers, all of whom are involved in finding solutions for more sustainable living. The Living Lab partnered with Rice on a previous project to develop a device to simplify composting at home.

Rice University engineering student Harrison Lin tends to the Växthus, an indoor greenhouse for growing a variety of vegetables in a small space. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The Rice students said their greenhouse project furthers that mission by enhancing city life.

The team worked at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and was advised by Matthew Elliott, a lecturer in mechanical engineering, and Gary Woods, a professor in the practice of computer technology and electrical and computer engineering. Its goal was to produce an efficient and attractive prototype small enough for an apartment. The result is a wood-paneled greenhouse with a clear acrylic front. “I think we did really well, thinking about how it would feel as an outside user,” said Hua. “We wanted to create a product that made the user interface easy.”

The greenhouse is a soil-based rather than hydroponic system. That allows users to grow a greater variety of vegetables, as hydroponic systems don’t have the space for the deep-root systems that vegetables like carrots require.

The Växthus greenhouse developed by Rice University students is a soil-based unit that allows apartment dwellers to grow vegetables with deep roots, such as carrots, indoors. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The fully automated Växthus design controls lighting and watering with a closed-loop system. Moisture, temperature and humidity sensors collect data and send it to a touchscreen display, with on and off switches for water and light. When the soil is dry, the greenhouse releases water for the plants. When it senses that the soil’s moisture level is fine, it turns off. The team added manual controls so users can override the automatic functions.

A pump system lets water drip from the ceiling to mimic rain and reclaims it from the drip tray below. “Any excess water will percolate through into the tank below,” Kaplan said. That allows the device to recycle water.

During the design phase, the team grew kale and herbs, and now has carrots and radishes growing in the greenhouse.

The team is building two more of the devices and will ship them to Sweden, and in June it will install them at the Living Lab, where residents and researchers will continue testing the units, tweaking the automated system as necessary and growing different vegetables.

Rice University engineering students have built an indoor greenhouse for growing vegetables in an urban apartment setting. Clockwise from top left are Harrison Lin, Jack Kaplan, Mary Bao and Mike Hua. Additional team members Colin Losey and Lingbo Chen are not pictured. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

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Visit the team’s website at http://oedk.rice.edu/Sys/PublicProfile/41451186/4330110.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Video:

https://youtu.be/xaH0knxWoQQ

Video produced by Brandon Martin/Rice University

Related materials:

HSB Living Lab: https://hll.livinglab.chalmers.se

George R. Brown School of Engineering: https://engineering.rice.edu

Images for download:

http://news.rice.edu/files/2018/05/0513_VAXTHUS-1-web-2hgo5iy.jpg

Rice University engineering students have built an indoor greenhouse for growing vegetables in an urban apartment setting. Clockwise from top left are Harrison Lin, Jack Kaplan, Mary Bao and Mike Hua. Additional team members Colin Losey and Lingbo Chen are not pictured. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/files/2018/05/0513_VAXTHUS-2-web-2f3kcec.jpg

Rice University engineering student Harrison Lin tends to the Växthus, an indoor greenhouse for growing a variety of vegetables in a small space. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/files/2018/05/0513_VAXTHUS-3-web-295phmv.jpg

The Växthus greenhouse developed by Rice University students is a soil-based unit that allows apartment dwellers to grow vegetables with deep roots, such as carrots, indoors. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/files/2018/05/0513_VAXTHUS-4-web-21hqrmk.jpg

Rice University engineering student Mary Bao tends to Växhaus, a compact indoor growing system for a variety of vegetables. The system will be tested at the HSP Living Lab at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden this summer. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,970 undergraduates and 2,934 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for happiest students by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.