Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : September 05, 2021 - September 08, 2021
Recently, as increase of food demand due to the population growth, aeroponic cultivation system, which has higher production efficiency than other cultivation systems, has attracted great attention. Although potato is one of the vegetables expected to be mass-produced due to its richness in nutrition, it is difficult to cultivate them by conventional aeroponics systems where the products are not physically supported. In order to develop an aeroponic system to cultivate potatoes, development of a cultivation medium to support seeds and baby potatoes without any hindrance to nutrient supply is required. In this study, we applied lattice-structured mediums to aeroponic cultivation of potatoes. The result of a cultivation test in which potatoes were cultivated with spraying hydroponic method using lattice-structured mediums demonstrated that supporting potatoes by lattice-structured mediums promotes growth of potatoes and increases harvest weight of tubers. Moreover, for harvesting potatoes efficiently without any damages, we developed a novel 3D gel printer enabling fabrication of gel-based cultivation mediums. The fabrication tests of the 3D gel printer led to determine the optimal air pressure of extruding gels and CaCl2 concentration of sol support bath, which are 0.30 MPa and 0.30 mmol/L, respectively.
