Welcome to Argilab, the new Agro Living Lab of
the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, in Terrassa, and part of the X-Agritec network.
This is an innovative space for researching and experimenting with
air quality and green infrastructures.
Argilab combines technology and sustainability.
Here we explore how to integrate urban agriculture into buildings to
improve air quality, energy efficiency, and produce local food.
We like to create this synergy between technology,
together with
the building’s energy flows to better utilize resources like water,
oxygen from people, or even reduce energy from mechanical ventilation systems, etc.
We are currently working on two key projects.
Move for Edu, a project studying the synergy between
greenhouses and buildings to utilize residual flows from buildings and
improve crop productivity.
What we’ve seen is that natural ventilation has its limitations,
and
since it heavily depends on our behavior, we often
prioritize thermal comfort over ventilation.
This shows that mechanical ventilation is quite important.
Installing mechanical ventilation systems in a building has a high cost
that might prevent the installation of such systems.
We are trying to find synergies with other subsystems,
such as a greenhouse,
to see if these systems can achieve greater economic viability.
The other project is VineFed, which proposes technical improvements to
the greenhouse, such as LED lighting and photovoltaic glass,
along with artificial intelligence tools to optimize
the operation of urban agriculture systems, advancing towards an
effective ecological transition.
In the greenhouse, we have separated it into two rooms.
One is a control room, and the other is monitored.
In this case, we have a crop with three species,
with three varieties of each, and we’ve been conducting various tests. ...