HumiPlast: the development of melt electrowritten, flexible and micro-porous sensors for monitoring plant transpiration in real time

Climate change is posing serious threats on global agricultural productivity. More frequently than ever, crops are facing extreme and unpredictable weather events, which lead to drought, heat, flooding, and pathogen stress. Knowing how plants deal with stress and understanding how they are sensing stress is crucial for safeguarding agricultural productivity under a changing climate. The era of smart farming is revolutionizing our current farming systems, thanks to major advancements in electronics, information technology and material sciences. In the HumiPlast project, we aim at developing an affordable humidity sensor able to measure plant transpiration in real-time, hereby combining advanced technologies in an interdisciplinary approach and progressing beyond the state-of-the-art. Melt electrowriting of novel polymers will be used as the high-resolution 3D printing tool to fabricate flexible meshes on which conductive and dielectric films will be placed to sense humidity by resistance or capacitance changes. The development of such a novel plant sensor that can measure specific plant physiological processes, will open a new field in plant diagnostics.

Keywords:Plant sensors, Plant transpiration, functional polymers, melt electrowriting, additive manufacturing, nanotechnology, microfabrication

Disciplines:Functional materials, Polymer processing, Manufacturing processes, methods and technologies, Nanomanufacturing, Electrochemical methods