Development of a Supporting System for Nutrient Solution Management in Hydroponics - II. Estimation of Electrical Conductivity(EC) using Neural Networks

양액재배를 위한 배양액관리 지원시스템의 개발 - II. 신경회로망에 의한 전기전도도(EC)의 추정

As the automation of nutrient solution management proceeds in the field of hydroponics, effective supporting systems to manage the nutrient solution by computer become needed. This study was attempt to predict the EC of nutrient solution using the neural networks. The multilayer perceptron consisting of 3 layers with the back propagation learning algorithm was selected for EC prediction, of which nine variables in the input layer were the concentrations of each ion and one variable in the output layer the EC of nutrient solution. The meq unit in ion concentration was selected fir input variable in the input layer. After the 10,000 learning sweeps with 108 sample data, the comparison of predicted and measured ECs for 72 test data showed good agreements with the correlation coefficient of 0.998. In addition, the predicted ECs by neural network showed relatively equal or closer to the measured ones than those by current complicated models.