International Congress and Workshop on Agricultural Structures and Irrigation, Diyarbakır, Türkiye, 12 - 15 Mayıs 2022, ss.181
Water stress studies are basically based on the principle of controlled reduction of the applied
amount. Although water stress studies applied in field conditions give results with sufficient
accuracy, they may vary due to exposure of external factors. For this reason, conducting studies
in a controlled environment influences increasing the reliability of the results. In a controlled
environment, factors other than the amount of irrigation water (light intensity, exposure time,
growing media, air temperature, relative humidity, wind, diseases, pests, etc.) should be equal.
However, relative humidity, one of these factors, is often overlooked. There are units used to
remove moisture from the controlled environment. However, these units are less preferable due
to their high cost and maintenance requirement. Today, rapidly developing technology has led to
the introduction of various microprocessor development units. Based on this, an automatic
moisture removal system was developed for an existing controlled environment (Crop Stress
Monitoring and Thermography Laboratory, ÇOMÜ Faculty of Agriculture, Çanakkale, Turkey).
The system built on the Arduino UNO microprocessor unit can start and stop an aspirator fan
with a diameter of 35 cm at the changeable humidity and temperature limit values, according to
the DHT11 temperature humidity sensor data. The system, which includes laboratory-specific
design and software, allows the limit values to be changed thanks to a touchscreen on it. In this
way, the relative humidity and temperature limit values required for different growing media
(sand, clay, silt, peat, perlite, etc.) and plants can be adjusted. The cost of the system with all its
components is around $200, which shows that it can be easily integrated into existing growing
environments.