PHOTOSYSTEM
CHAMBER
The Photosystem Chamber
The Photosystem Chambers were developed in a cooperation between CESRF, Intravision and Conviron originally as a marijuana research tool for the Canadian Licensed Producer ABcann Medicinals.
These chambers represent a space tech-tranfer from the Hypobaric Guelph Blue-Boxes, only in a sealed (non-hypobaric) version.
Environmental controls
In these unique sealed chambers we are able to modulate and understand the interdependencies of all the environmental variables relevant for growing plants in a sealed system;
•Temperature
•Humidity
•Carbon dioxide
•Oxygen (higher or lower)
•Light (quantity, quality)
•Nutrients
•Plant water status
•Insect predation
•Pathogen application/response
In practical terms this means that we for example are able to get an instant feedback and understanding of how changes in light spectrum combinations effect the plant CO2 uptake, or the impact on the plants evapotranspiration on the combination of slight changes in light spectrum, temperature and CO2 concentration.
In the below curves we show an example of these correlations, data on a strawberry plants in the vegetative phase:
Optimizing Environmental Variables
Top Left: X-axis show higher light intensities and Y-axis CO2 uptake on the plant, while the curves display biomass growth expressed vy CO2 uptake at Ambient air 400ppm of CO2, and on 3 times the CO2 concentration at 1200ppm of CO2.
Bottom Left: Show that for this plant, the CO2 uptake is nearly linear within the range from ambient up to 2000ppm of CO2, so potentially this plant could benefit from an even higher concentration.
Top Right: Show that this plant repel less water at the higher CO2 concentration, indicating that in the vegetation phase an enhanced CO2 concentration is beneficial in minimizing problems related to high moisture content in air - i.e. powdery mildew.
Bottom Right: Show the same correlation between CO2 concentration and evapotranspiration as the Bottom-Left show on CO2 concentration and light intensity.
We can then introduced variations in light spectrum combinations, in temperature, in relative humidity and so on, in the aim to understand the optimal conditions for a specific plants versus the complete growth environment we impose on it.
