Friday November 15, 2019 at 11:00am
LettUs Grow is a start-up based in Bristol that designs, builds and sells indoor vertical farms.
They work hard to develop a more robust food supply chain with less waste and a
lower environmental impact.
The nature of their engineering work has its challenges, as
they aspire to create a functional product that offers a seamless interface
between living plants and new technology. Their farm facility is used to
investigate user-experience and plant behaviour to drive product development.
LettUs Grow uses aeroponic
technology to grow their crops, growing plants in an air or mist environment
without the use of soil or an aggregate medium, housing over 40 variations of
salad, soft fruit and root crops. This means their plantsgrow close to the
consumer all year round. This farming technique involves suspending plant roots
in a dense mist solution of nutrients and water, at LettUs Grow they create and
manufacture bespoke aeroponicgrow beds that minimise the required land footprint.
LettUs Grow is a unique workplace in which engineers work closely with biologists, farmers and
plant physiologists to achieve successful products that can perform well in
real-life. By involving plant experts from the earliest stages of the technical
design process, the engineers can thoughtfully design a farm product around the
precise needs and requirements of the plants and the consumers.
The drawings they create in SOLIDWORKS
allow them to communicate their intricate designs to external manufacturers,
they're also able to quickly edit and test prototypes which makes the software
invaluable to their team.
By being able to see clear 3D visual models the team is
always coming up with new ideas and technical discussions which inspires new products
for sustainable living.
LettUs Grow uses SOLIDWORKS Standard, Electrical,
PCB
and Visualize.
“By having these add-on products we were able to model the farm in its entirety
as a large, electro-mechanical assembly, using the software integration system
that SOLIDWORKS offers, we could closely monitor and control the conditions the
plants are exposed to. This has enhanced academic research into how environmental factors can be adapted to match a plant’s
growth cycle, optimising farm productivity. The ability to generate
photo-realistic renders in SOLIDWORKS Visualize also helped us to accelerate
sales and bring our seemingly futuristic concept into reality.”, comments Ben Crowther,
the Co-founder & CTO of Lettus Grow.
Since
2017, the LettUs Grow team has raised over £1million in investment to develop
their prototypes into commercial products. They hope the sustainability ethos of
their farms will inspire members of the agriculture and food retail industries
to explore the benefits of aeroponics and sustainable ways of growing produce.
For more information about LettUs Grow visit their website: https://www.lettusgrow.com/
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