Terry Lin is undertaking his PhD with Western Sydney University’s Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment (HIE), surveying the efficacy of various warm-climate greenhouse set-ups and technologies.
Lin’s thesis, Titled ‘Optimal cooling strategies for protected cropping of cucumber in warm-climates’ will focus on describing crop, technology and climate interactions produced by various protected cropping strategies and greenhouse designs in Australia’s warm climate.
Working at HIE’s high-tech experimental glasshouse under Professor Zhonghua Chen, he’ll evaluate the long-term performance of several cooling technologies and greenhouse set-ups.
One important goal will be to characterise the energy-saving potential of ‘smart glass’ (glass coated with photoselective thin film) for greenhouses, gathering data from existing crop trials within HIE’s high-tech glasshouse facility, which has trial bays retrofitted with smart glass.
Lin’s insights will be used to support the design of a greenhouse energy- and mass-transfer model, to be validated using experimental data from greenhouses and cooling systems in various Australian locations.
Lead image: CRC PhD student Terry Lin, speaking about his research at the 2022 Protected Cropping Australia conference in March.