For my bachelor thesis I did a project for a dutch company called Priva. They design sustainable climate and irrigation systems for greenhouses and are currently focusing on the European market. The aim of this project was to develop a product, service or businessplan for Priva to enter the Chinese market.

I mainly focussed on trying to find a way to make a Priva product affordable and useably for the Chinese farmer. Not only are the current Priva products to expensive for a Chinese farmer, they are also very complicated and demand a certain educational degree from the user, which these people don’t have.

Therefore I did a lot of research into the current Chinese greenhouses and their farming techniques, my goal being that designing a system that compliments and improves the current greenhouses in China will be a lot easier to accept and more reachable for the farmers. Besides that I found out that the environmental impact of the current greenhouses is far to high and the production to low to meet the

national Chinese demand.

The outcome of my project was a climate control system which takes account of a traditional Chinese greenhouse. It is a partly automated system that can cool and heat the greenhouse but still requires a significant input of the farmers. It contains a couple of simple heating/cooling units, complemented with a portable device which gives the farmer instructions about how to improve his production. In this way he will not only enlarge his production but also gain more knowledge about how different parameters can influence the growth of his crop.

The climate units make use of a thermal energy storage system which they share with other greenhouse and is nanced by the government. This will require a significant investment from the government but in return they will get a much more efficient and sustainable industry which will decrease the food shortages in China.