An aeroponics vertical farming solution for efficient, sustainable, and cheaper urban farming.
PulsePonics
Conrad/Diamond Challenge (2024-2025 School Year)
Role: Chief Design Officer, CAD Designing, IoT
PulsePonics is a modular vertical rotary aeroponics system that uses 98% less water while maintaining 3x faster growth speed compared to soil farming. The rotary mechanism saves energy by eliminating the need for 360° lighting and ensures that all plants receive equal light exposure. With integrated IoT-enabled sensors for real-time monitoring of nutrient levels and environmental conditions, PulsePonics makes farming smarter, more efficient, accessible, and scalable.
Background
As students and innovators, we observed the inefficiencies in both traditional and modern farming methods and decided to re-imagine how food could be grown in urban settings.
Inefficient Traditional Farming
Soil farming wastes water, relies on pesticides, and depends on shrinking land. Climate change has undoubtedly worsened globally throughout the last decade, as shown through the increasing natural disasters—droughts, floods, wildfires, hailstorms, hurricanes—yet agriculture is headed straight for failure. It leading to unstable yields and rising costs. Most farmers lack access to sustainable, high-density farming solutions.
Current Solution
Aeroponics
Aeroponics takes the next step as plants grow with their roots suspended in air, receiving nutrients through a fine mist. This allows maximum oxygen exposure and faster nutrient absorption, leading to healthier plants and higher yields with minimal water use.
Hydroponics
Hydroponics replaces soil with a nutrient-rich water solution that directly feeds plant roots. This method uses up to 90% less water than traditional farming and accelerates plant growth.
Although existing hydroponics farms already exist, our team has noticed significant energy being taken. And the hydroponic systems can suffer from water stagnation, uneven nutrient delivery, and high power usage for lighting and pumps.
Vertical farms take up on average 38.8kW/h per kg of maintain, which is 7 times that of traditional farming.
Existing hydroponic and aeroponic systems, while innovative, often face challenges like high costs, uneven light distribution, and difficult maintenance.
Pain Points
Based on existing data and phenomena, we have summarized the major issues currently facing agriculture.
These issues became the core motivation behind PulsePonics a system that delivers farming innovation in the way people actually need it:
Efficient Automated Sustainable
Design Goal
The design goals for “PulsePonics” are rooted in solving the urgent challenges of sustainable urban agriculture with a sharp focus on efficiency, automation, and accessibility. Every design decision was guided by three core objectives:
Aeroponics
Ensure plants reach maturity up to 3× faster than in soil-based systems while using 98% less water.
The rotary design eliminates the need for 360° lighting, reduces energy by 15–20%
Guarantees even nutrient and light exposure across all crops.
Automation for Every Urban Farmer (IoT)
Empower users through IoT-enabled sensors and a real-time dashboard.Farmers can monitor humidity, pH, and nutrient levels remotely via an app. With no manual setup or constant supervision required, PulsePonics learns and adjusts automatically.
Sustainability Through Innovation
Minimize environmental impact: Combine aeroponics technology with the rotary mechanism to eliminate pesticide use; leverage a controlled environment to recycle nearly all water, reducing waste to near zero.
Adopt a modular, stackable tower design that supports flexible scaling. This allows high-density, space-efficient food production in various indoor environments, catering to diverse users— from small-scale urban farmers to large commercial growing operations.
Design Concept
IoT Integration
Users with real-time data and control via a smartphone app
The IoT dashboard tracks critical metrics, such as temperature, humidity, pH, EC, and light levels, offering useful insights into plant and system health. Users can remotely adjust misting intervals and nutrient delivery schedules, making the system accessible and user-friendly. Alerts for maintenance, low nutrient levels, or plant health concerns ensure timely interventions, further supporting plant vitality. Additionally, a machine learning-powered computer vision system can analyze plant health further through a camera mounted next to the lights. This system detects early signs of nutrient deficiencies, pests, or diseases by examining leaf colour, texture, and growth patterns, enabling users to address issues proactively.
Improved Aeroponics System
The system employs an improved aeroponics system, delivering nutrient-rich mist directly to plant roots through evenly spaced nozzles mounted on the central column. Aeroponics is known for its efficiency, using 90% less water than traditional farming methods and 30% less than hydroponics. This efficiency is further enhanced by a built-in water recycling system that collects and reuses excess water, reducing waste to near zero.
Prototyping
Modeling & 3D Printing
The 6-foot-tall cylindrical tower, constructed from durable and food-safe Schedule 40 PVC, features modular, stackable components for easy assembly, scalability, and maintenance. Capable of holding up to 72 plants, the staggered net pot design maximizes airflow and space efficiency. The unique rotary mechanism, powered by a stepper motor, rotates the tower at 1–2 RPM, ensuring even light and mist exposure across all plants. This design not only enhances plant health and growth uniformity but also reduces energy costs by 15–20% by minimizing the number of LED lights required for sufficient illumination.
Achievement
PulsePonics has achieved remarkable impacts in urban agriculture:
These outcomes make it an automatic, scalable, and sustainable solution for modern farming.
Website
To reach out towards possible customers, we plan on being in direct contact through mail/phone. We also have a website that consumers can visit to learn more.
Financial
Cost Structure
Financial Projections
Business Model
