Temperature Sensor!

 

The role of temperature sensor in Hydroponics

Agricultural Temperature Sensor

Highly accurate temperature and humidity sensors and precise predictive temperature forecasts are necessary. Temperature sensors play a significant role in monitoring the ambient conditions of physical space. Even light sensors are widely used. Additionally, they play an essential role in nearly all intelligent agriculture asset monitoring applications.

Temperature Sensor – Importance of Measuring Temperature

Measuring air and temperature moisture can make or break your agricultural operation. Thus, it is vital to get it right. Temperature and humidity go hand in hand when raising crops in a greenhouse. Partially because imbalances in either can often give similar results. Plants are responsive to their environments.

Plants depend on a specific set of air conditions to survive. This is primarily due to their need to respire. Plant respiration is the process of water leaving the leaves through evaporation via the stomata on the underside of the leaves. Stomata are tiny openings, usually on the surface of a plant’s leaves, which allow for the regulation of gas exchanges and moisture regulation during photosynthesis.

Temperature Sensor – Does High Temperature Affect Agriculture?

Imbalances in humidity can affect this process. If humidity levels are too high, the evaporating water from the stomata has no place to go as the air is already saturated.

High temperature has similar effects in influencing the stomata, though it can have the opposite effect. Plants tend to close their stomata at high temperatures with low relative humidity to preserve water. However, warm air can hold more significant volumes of moisture, meaning that the combination of high relative humidity and high temperature can be lethal.

Temperature Sensor – Does Low Temperature Affect Agriculture?

Once again, low humidity affects those all-important stomata. Air with low relative humidity levels can cause plants to close their stomata to conserve water, much like the effects of high temperature.

In tandem with this is the effect of cold air, which is less capable of retaining moisture. Cold temperatures also cause many plants to stunt their growth as a self-protection mechanism, like the effects of winter when most plants lose their leaves and lie dormant.

Imbalances in temperature or humidity can have a roster of detrimental effects on plants and potentially cause waste of whole crops.

How Can Temperature Sensors Help?

With intelligent humidity and temperature sensors coupled with responsive automation systems that can regulate the temperature and humidity of your greenhouse, growers can leave these essential functions to the technology. 

Soil Temperature Sensors in Agriculture

Soil temperature dramatically influences the agricultural productivity of a country. The measurement of Soil temperature has many advantages in agriculture. For example, based on soil temperature data, farmers or agricultural sector investors can decide the crop type appropriate for a particular soil, the exact time of planting the crops, etc. On the other hand, these people can optimize the temperature of that agricultural field by some means or mechanism.

Temperature affects several processes in soil and soil ecosystems, which makes it imperative to measure soil temperature. Soil temperature affects the following:

• respiration
• photosynthesis
• transpiration
• water potential of the soil
• soil translocation 
• microbial activity

Factors That Influence Soil Temperature 

These can be classified as surface and subsurface soil temperature factors. Surface soil temperature factors include: 

• radiation from the sun
• the slope of the land
• water content
• vegetative cover
• Albedo, or the light reflected by the earth 

There are three major heat transfer processes in soils: conduction, convection, and radiation. These processes are affected by the soil medium.

Challenges Of Soil Temperature Measurement 

• Non-uniform temperature distribution
• low resolution
• low accuracy in modeling
• self-heating effect
• short life span of the sensors.

Role of Soil Temperature Measurements in Farming

The temperature of the agricultural soil conditions the microbial processes which take place in the soil. Temperature influences the absorption of nutrients, especially phosphorus, which is lower in cold soils.

Soil temperature is critical because it influences:

• In biotic processes.
• In chemicals.
• For germination that is usually above 5ºC, measured in real time with the soil temperature sensor.

Each plant has its specific requirements. The top layer of agricultural soil suffers the most significant temperature fluctuations. The temperature of the surface layer is transmitted upwards to the air and downwards to lower layers of the earth and the subsoil, damping rapidly and significantly downwards.

Need for Temperature Sensor

The temperature and humidity sensor can monitor the changes in air temperature and humidity in the agriculture planting environment, designed in two significant variations. In one variation, the sensor acts as a trigger when a specific temperature or humidity level is reached and a particular circuit is activated. Other variations are used to measure the actual temperature or humidity in the ambient air, and it has a different analog response to the level of those two atmospheric readings.

Role of the Temperature Sensor

The temperature sensors play two critical roles in the intelligent agriculture-ambient conditions of physical space and mechanical asset monitoring. 

Future of Temperature Sensors in Agriculture

The intelligent agriculture industry is continually growing and expanding, with new solutions coming to the market almost daily. Devices that aggregate sensor data, relay critical information to farmers and ranchers, and help optimize vast agricultural processes continually increase in capability and importance.

Compiled by: Arjun, Data Scientist