Kyle Garza  0:02  
So this is Paul Jorge and I his final presentation on wireless solid set canopy delivery system for tree cooling. So let's go ahead and get started. So our problem statement here. global climate change has increased global temperatures since the 19th century accelerating sharply during the last 35 years as co2 gas release into the atmosphere has increased. This increase in global temperatures has affected agricultural crops around the world. California temperatures have increased by 1.7 degrees Celsius in the last century. And Cal adapt projects a 2.7 degrees Celsius to 4.3 degrees Celsius increase in annual temperatures for California. Current counties began experiencing higher than average winter temperatures and is predicted to undergo an average increase to of 1.8 degrees Celsius to 4.5 degrees Celsius annually. So the United States produces 47% of the world's pistachios, California produced 98.5% of the nation's pistachios valued at 1.9 million in 2017. And current county in southern San Joaquin Valley produce 44% of California's pistachios in 2017. due to the increase in popularity of sorry, due to the increase in popularity for pistachios, last year, the pistachio crop in Kern County alone generated $1.06 billion in 2015. An increase in winter temperatures was believed to be the primary factor causing a 47% drop in the pistachio crop production for that year. So pistachio trees require 850 hours below 45 degrees between November 1 and march 30. In if the winter chills insufficient it can severely reduce the crop yields for end the crop crop quality that year. When chilling requirements are not completed, completely fulfilled trees display irregular and temporarily spread out flowering, leading to inhomogeneous crop development, production of blank or empty nuts and can substantially reduce the value of the crop. I recently had the opportunity to see this firsthand. We went out to Coalinga to tour one of the owners larger orchards a couple of weeks ago. And that is where the pictures you can see here were taken. There were this was taken. This was taken after the harvest was finished for the year. As you can see the nuts there are still nuts on the tree. These are due to the due to bloom synchronism being off causing irregular pollination. All of these nuts will go on the ground this year so there'll be wasted. But a large number of them are empty shells like the one that you can see pictured in Paul's hand there. So our existing research attempts to make a more resilient strand of pistachio trees, requiring fewer chill hours has been started. However, it may still be a while before they're successful, and even then, it will likely be another seven years before those trees begin to produce. There isn't there is also ongoing research with dormancy braking with a dormancy braking chemical. But again, there's still a lot more work to be done in that respect. Tests of winter applied coilin clay or calcium carbonate basement chemicals intended to either reflect solar radiation or to fuse it are also underway. However, the data thus far suggests that spraying these materials to mitigate the negative effects of warm winter temperatures does not assure you of a normal crop, but it might prevent no crop in July of the year 2000. Preliminary evaporative cooling trial was set up to test effects on cherry trees. There was a significant difference in the flowering times of these trees. The sprinkled trees flowered approximately two weeks earlier than the ns sprinkled trees. So that's a good thing there. And our objective until now this method of increasing winter chill hours has not been attempted on pistachio trees in particular. Seeing the positive results rendered on cherry trees. We anticipated this to be an effective method in battling the effects of warmer winter weather on the pistachio crops. Our objective was to design a

system that will allow us to have control of the growing environment. temperature. This can be achieved by incorporating and above tree canopy misting system by utilizing various technologies we can attempt to decrease the ambient temperature of the grove artificially producing the necessary winter chill requirement. So after this, we should have a brief virtual tour.

Paul Blanco
Pistachio orchard, located in the West region of Bakersfield, California, this was an ideal location, two acres of trees were divided into two sections. The section shown here in this aerial photograph is where we set up our equipment to run our tests. perpendicular to the section not shown in the aerial photograph, there's another acre of trees with a similar layout, providing us with the perfect control zone. There's enough separation between the two sections that the system should have little if any effect on the control zone, yet still close enough together that we can disregard any other outside variables for being responsible for any differences in the trees. We divided the orchard up into eight separate zones. Each zone consists of four pistachio trees, each with a nozzle suspended above it approximately eight meters has four identical nozzles and every zone features a different type of nozzle. We're also testing to determine what type of misting is the most effective for evaporative cooling. So the nozzles range from a fine mist to heavy droplets. Here we have a total of 32 pistachio trees under evaluation. temperature monitoring is managed in each zone by a mesh network of individual wireless sensors and transmitters. Each device is equipped with a small solar panel with an MPPT charging controller and lipo battery. Information is collected and then broadcast to the central controller utilizing the ZigBee network using XP modules. temperature data is collected using the TMP 36 sensor position near the end of the branches with new budding will occur. This information once collected is then transmitted to Smart Control System where its evaluated and then posted to a cloud based database. The temperature data is found to be above a set threshold Smart Control system will activate the solid set canopy delivery system and begin a period of misting. This period will last for 30 minutes and the system will shut down for 30 minutes allowing the thermal equilibrium to stabilize before being evaluated again. The system will repeat this process indefinitely until the initial condition of ambient temperature is satisfied. Theoretically misting with the solid set canopy deliverey system should modify the microclimate and increase chill through evaporative cooling providing an environmentally friendly solution to enhance wind chill hours.


Jorge Mosquedadelgado
 Alright, so this is our Google Cloud and fire base. So for this presentation, I am going to show you a couple graphs right, and there's five of them data where we have time we're trying these experiments. And as you can see the lines which are showing you different zones are giving you different feedback, different results. Basically, we're trying to get as much, you know, accurate results as we possibly can in this experiment, the more accurate you can be the better. So, for this, we have a system that utilizes IoT, with this internet of things. And this is a new technology with our cloud based storage and control. It is built on the Google Cloud Platform and uses Firebase for our online storage database. This allows us to log historical temperature data, and system events in an off site database, which is really good really, really, really good for us, we can keep track of your well being on the specific database or that specific site. The Google Cloud platform provides the framework to build web based applications to view current and historical data, we will monitor the system health and even control the system remotely, which is, you know, really cool, this is the good thing about the internet and Google and all these firebases they're basically giving us the options to do everything we could do in person over the internet, which is really good for anyone. We just have busy lives, we have to keep track of it somehow. Alright guys, so our current prototype, and these are results with up with a and b right here as you can see, one of them has a system on and off once the old one has a step on system office mon system off and as you can see the variables and tie and just in general the temperature has changed dramatically drastically. So, for the missing zones, it is a blue solid line, I put the control zone it is that red squiggly line on both of them we are measuring temperatures still in Celsius. So for this the

system.

So essentially, when the red line you know it represents the ambient temperature with Celsius of the control them absolutely no missing red line means none control which makes us have that variable there. The blue one or the black one represents the blue one represents the temperature and zone one, the vertical black line presents the start valve which valve one is on and stopped means valve one is off.

Okay guys,

for the next results, we did another experiment three. And from experiment three as you can see data changes, our temperature decreases in each stone. The vertical black line indicates when the valve opened and when the orange vertical line indicates when the valve is close. And take a look very similar to last. You can see right here, but definitely more zones. So definitely more variables control is consistent. Variables are definitely changed. Alright for a poor pipe for prototype, we are going to go and work on improvements. This is a crucial for any sort of experiment, we'll be adding the additional solar radiation sensor, either on the weather box station or each tree sensor box will also have the additional soil moisture sensors to each sensor box as a failsafe, just in case the system for a system fails it to prevent accidental damage to the trees in case of that system failure. So it won't cause over missing for our future expansion. Albert Einstein with his ideas just like us getting ideas, we are all learning and we're all trying to improve. So especially for the future we have right we will definitely explore the effects of for temperature control over the entire dominating, creating optimal temperature and production. to place these trees into dormancy. We will have control temperature reduction throughout dormancy and optimal temperature increases to bring them out, we will explore systems capability to deploy until larger scale, grow full scale growth. So essentially we're trying to expand we don't want to be, you know, is a good here but we want to expand this will make this the future this is what everyone should use. Okay, so next steps we will measure evaluate the following with more ideas, we will review the results determine the duration of missing, whether it be hours or treatment at different temperatures, review the results and study intervals between applications to conserve water within hours and days and turn on when evaporative cooling ceases at different temperatures, we will review the results to determine the most effective job size, the job size to have the most maximum evaporative cooling duration. These study logs are going to be used to evaluate the amount of water applied, whether it be volume, centimeters per application, and we will follow up not just with Grove owners to discuss flower quality evaluation with regards to bloom synchrony pollen and ovule viabilities and also post harvest fruit quality data tree yields nuts rating by the facility factory. Okay guys, and thank you first. Thank you guys for allowing us to share research with you this couldn't have been possible without the funding from the California Department of Agriculture's blood specialty program cdfa and whatever everything all these contents are solely our responsibility. The US the author's and not necessarily represent the official views of the cdfa