ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Sustainable and Intelligent Phytoprotection
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1615927
Design of a Nutrient Solution Supply Device for a Vertical Aeroponic Cultivation System
Provisionally accepted
- Yantai Research Institute, China Agricultural University, Yantai, China
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Aeroponic cultivation systems provide precise environmental control for plant growth, effectively block the reproductive pathways of root diseases and pests, and facilitate efficient water resource recycling, thereby offering a scalable technical solution for intensive, high-yield, and sustainable agricultural production. Aiming to address the complex underground pipelines and excessive spray nozzles in fixed-pipeline nutrient solution supply systems of conventional vertical aeroponic cultivation, this study proposes a vertical aeroponic cultivation paradigm for large-scale production that can be applied to mobile nutrient solution supply modes. This study analyzes the structural components and operational workflow of the vertical aeroponic cultivation system, and the structural components, operational principles and technical specifications of the dedicated nutrient solution supply device. Transient dynamic analysis is conducted using ANSYS Workbench 2025 R1 (student) software, thereby yielding the equivalent stress /strain distributions on the body frame at 0.15 m/s, and on the spray bracket at 0.4 m/s. The simulation results demonstrate that both structures maintain stress within material limits and without significant concentration areas, with minimal strain levels meeting operational requirements. The Box-Behnken experimental design methodology is adopted to establish flow rate of the spray nozzles, moving speed of the spray nozzles, and vertical height from the test points on the legs of the trapezoidal cross-section of the cultivation bed to the ground as experimental factors, with nutrient solution coverage rate as evaluation indicator. The experimental results are analyzed using Design Expert 13.0 software to establish a regression model and conduct optimization analysis. The optimization results indicate that with a flow rate of 3 L/min for the spray nozzles and a moving speed of 0.38 m/s for the spray nozzles, the nutrient solution coverage rates on the legs of the trapezoidal cross-section of the cultivation bed reach >90% for both vertical height positions (0.1 m and 1.4 m from ground). This configuration ensures >90% nutrient solution coverage rate across the entire legs of the trapezoidal cross-section of the cultivation bed. Verification experiments confirm nutrient solution coverage rates at the respective test points are 90.33% and 91.52%, which is in accordance with the practical application requirements.
Keywords: Aeroponics, Nutrient solution, nutrient solution supply device, Vertical farming, Soilless cultivation, Facility horticulture
Received: 22 Apr 2025; Accepted: 17 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, He, Zhang, Wang and Tan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Shuguang Liu, Yantai Research Institute, China Agricultural University, Yantai, China
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