Figure 1
Figure 2
Team 14
Team Members |
Faculty Advisor |
Artur Zielinski |
Kristina Wagstrom Sponsor Other |
sponsored by
The community of rural Masindi, Uganda suffers from malnutrition due to an unvaried diet and a lack of an adequate food supply. Partnering with Guiding Light Orphans (GLO), a non-profit charity organization, the goal of this project was to design a hydroponic greenhouse facility which would allow the year-round cultivation of various nutritious vegetables and livestock fodder independently of the poor growing conditions of the region. Hydroponics’ core principle involves supplying plants with nutrient-rich solutions containing all of the compounds necessary for growth; these solutions are further tailored to individual plant species growth cycles to maximize agricultural output. By using concepts of fluid dynamics, we modeled the piping and pumping requirements, and calculated the water and solution flow requirements for such a facility based on hydroponic systems we designed, which are constrained by the availability of local materials. This allowed us to calculate the expected agricultural output and the total cost estimate of the facility. The construction of the proposed design would provide the people of Masindi with a high quantity of high quality food.