Drives & Controls May 2022

50 n SCIENTIFIC May 2022 www.drivesncontrols.com Digital twins help to cultivate underwater farming project I n 2021, Sergio Gamberini, president of the Italian scuba diving equipment manufacturer, Ocean Reef Group, and his son, Luca Gamberini, created Nemo’s Garden, a start-up dedicated to growing crops sustainably on the seabed. They now have a team of engineers, scientists and divers working to prove the viability of cultivating herbs, fruit and vegetables underwater. Their key innovation is a sub-aqua biosphere, an underwater“greenhouse”that takes advantage of environmental factors in the ocean – such as stable temperatures, CO 2 absorption, an abundance of oxygen and protection from pests – to create an ideal environment for cultivating crops. The team has not only harvested a variety of crops from prototype biospheres, but also discovered that plants are nutritionally richer than those grown traditionally. The next big hurdle was to turn their prototypes into a practical technology that could be deployed globally. But they didn’t want to wait 10 years for this to happen. Harsh winters, short summers and seafloor use restrictions limit Nemo’s Garden to one growth cycle – and thus one innovation cycle – per year. Design changes, lengthy physical testing and time-consuming monitoring prompted the team to look for ways of speeding up and scaling up their innovations. They contacted an Italian sustainability consultancy called Teksea which, in turn, invited Siemens to join the project, using its Xcelerator software to help Nemo’s Garden get to the next stage of development and to prepare for industrialising their concepts. In particular, a digital twin of the Nemo’s Garden biosphere has been created that simulates the growing conditions inside, and the impact of the equipment on the surrounding water. The developers are no longer limited by weather conditions, short growing seasons or restrictions on diving and monitoring. Changes to the biosphere can be tested in a virtual world, allowing the team to refine its designs much faster. “When I first saw Siemens’digital twin technology, I was mesmerised,”recalls Luca Gamberini.“Nemo’s Garden is a one-of-a-kind system and we need to adapt to each environment where it is to be installed. If you can model that environment virtually before you start, you can foresee the challenges and address them in the best way. “We have seen benefits in understanding the flow of water around our biospheres,”he adds.“We have a greater understanding of the points of stress on the structure around the biospheres. We also understand how the different interactions of the solar radiation, the temperature and all the physical factors, act on the plants – all thanks to the ability of the digital twin to replicate our system.” In addition to engineering the biosphere, the Nemo’s Garden team also needed to optimise and scale the processes for growing, tracking and harvesting the plants. To create a sustainable business that did not depend on sending trained divers to collect data, an automated approach was created that tapped into Siemens’experience in using software to automate traditional farming practices. Video of the growing cycles, along with data from traditional farming of the same crops at various stages of growth and health conditions, was analysed using Siemens’MindSphere cloud-based platform. From this, a machine- learning algorithmwas trained to monitor plant growth as well as the environmental conditions within the domes. This algorithm running on industrial edge computing devices in each biosphere allows the plants to be monitored via a cloud-based dashboard in real time. Nemo’s Garden is planning to connect the edge devices to actuators to control air circulation, humidity, irrigation and nutritional dosing automatically. This will be the foundation for a global agricultural service, optimised for subsea operations and tuned for different locations. By adopting digital transformation, Nemo’s Garden its turning its concept into a commercially viable subsea farming platform that can be deployed globally. The digital twin of the growing environment is allowing the team to push forward with plans to optimise its designs and automate its processes. “Digitalisation isn’t only for big companies, it is for all companies,”says Eryn Devola, vice- president of sustainability at Siemens Digital Industries Software.“In fact, great gains can often be realised in smaller or start-up companies. The work we do with start-ups can amplify the impact they have on the world, aiding in and speeding up innovation. It is easy to get excited when you we find a passionate teamwith human-centred technology that is working to feed people while having a positive impact on the environment.” n An Italian start-up developing technologies for subsea farming has accelerated its plans dramatically by turning to digital twins. It is also using cloud-based machine-learning algorithms running on edge devices to perform automation and remote monitoring, and to feed data back into the design process. The Nemo’s Garden project is developing techniques for cultivating crops underwater in seabed modules