(www.chicagotribune.com)
A garden at Illinois Tech is sprouting with broccoli, kale and an assortment of flowers — but its real job is to allow students to build out clean energy sources and test smart farming technologies.
UFarmIIT, a 5,000-square-foot garden on campus, started out six years ago as a collaborative project with professors and students from different disciplines. Now, UFarmIIT is developing into a smart farm the university hopes can prove concepts that will one day ease the pains of farming in cities.
The challenge is doing all of that without creating waste, said Hamid Arastoopour, engineering professor and director of the Wanger Institute for Sustainability and Energy Research, which helps fund and run the farm.
“It has social impact, it has economic impact and it has safety impact, but we have to do it right,” he said. “We cannot use electricity because it is already at a shortage … We have to be very careful that everything comes from renewables.”
The farm is well on its way. Students built a shed in a corner of the farm last summer, said Merjem Mededovic, president of the student organization also called UFarmIIT. The Wagner Institute funded the installation of two solar panels on top of the shed in April.
Volunteers then dug shallow trenches around and under the raised beds, laid down pipes for a watering system and installed a water pump and valves. The solar panels will power the water pump, Mededovic said.
A group of electrical engineering and computer science students are programming a micro-controller inside the pump, teaching the valves to turn on and off automatically.
Eventually, sensors will be able to measure moisture in the soil and tell the water pump when the plants are thirsty, said Jimmy Shah, a recent electrical engineering graduate.
That concept itself is not new, Shah said, but that’s where the testing aspect of UFarmIIT comes in.
“These sensors are off the shelf, but you have to integrate everything together,” he said. “Right now we’re working on proof of concept.”
Shah worked with the Center for Smart Grid Applications, Research and Technology, a lab at Illinois Tech. The students have a battery they plan to hook up to the solar panels as well, to store solar power for use when it’s not so sunny.
“We’re going to have so much power, you’re going to be able to use it for phone charging, too,” Shah said.
The hope is to feed extra power generated at UFarmIIT into the grid, Arastoopur said, and gather data on how much renewable energy an urban farm needs. Proving the students’ and faculty’s concepts will help secure funding to help the farm advance.
Plans are already cooking to add a water tank to the farm, further the compost system and incorporate aquaponics, a system that uses fish waste to grow plants.
Illinois Tech is known for its clean-tech innovation. Researchers there are helping ComEd build its microgrid in Bronzeville. The school’s own microgrid was completed in 2013 and has everything it needs to operate campus’ more than 50 buildings independently from the grid.