Smoke modified environment for crop frost protection: a fuzzy logic approach

During cold weather conditions, there is a high possibility that many crops or planted fields will be damaged due to frost, especially during cloudless cold nights. As it is well known the soil stores energy gained from the sun during the day light time. During cloudless cold nights the soil starts to loss this stored energy, and the soil surface temperature starts to drop less than the ambient temperature. When the soil surface temperature becomes around 0 °C the planted corps starts to freeze. This frost problem can highly damage the crops, or affect the crops growth process which leads to great financial losses for the agriculture sector.In this research a new intelligent agriculture controlled environment is presented based on a fuzzy logic system for frost protection in an open field environment by using a smoke generator or burner and a set of distributed wireless sensor nodes. The presented system can also be integrated with the available cell phone network in the farmer's region, so that the farmer can easily monitor and operate more than one field at a time from his home through his cell phone.The demonstrated simulation results over an examined field, have confirmed the ability of the new system to handle the frost problem at critical situations during cold weather condition by maintaining the soil surface temperature above the freezing point and saving the field crops from being damaged.