Energy Flow and a Field Trip

Yesterday, we took a little field trip to visit Growing Power’s Milwaukee headquarters.  In a former commercial greenhouse on the northwest side, Will Allen has built an impressive operation on a mere 1.5 acre site (the Plant has 14 acres under roof).  The organization has several goals: education, research and providing high quality, fresh foods in a food desert.  They also like to share their knowledge with other people who are working on similar problems.  We came (again) to see their aquaponics and composting systems since we’ll be building related systems ourselves.  www.growingpower.org

Cynthia, who will be largely responsible for getting the farm built, brought up a good idea: Insulating with compost!  If you build a top-load bin along an exterior wall, pull the finished material off of the bottom, and let the thing heat up, you’d be heating and insulating with a process you needed to do somewhere anyway.  What does the city Department of Buildings think?  Boy do we have an ever-growing list of things for them to object to.  We’ll see…

Meanwhile in the system controls department, one of our IIT grad students, Fernando, is working on a detailed plan to manage energy flow throughout the facility.  Our big advantage is having places to use all of the waste heat from lighting the farm nine months out of the year, 200,000 sq ft. of offices and manufacturing space.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little extra oxygen from the farm pumped into your office?  Using open source Arduino microcontroller boards, we’ll monitor hundreds of temperatures, oxygen levels, CO2 levels, and air change rates.  That data will be used to control hundreds of pumps, dampers, blowers, compressors and the geothermal system which will be tasked with moving much of that heat (or cold) around and storing it in, and under, the basement.  This is the fun part for an amateur engineer like me.  Don’t worry, some professional engineers have pledged their assistance.