Greenhouse Uses in Engineering

Experimentation

• Engineers do regular experiments to see how the many different types of industry they build effect the natural environment around us. For example, how do the emissions from a certain type of factory affect the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and how much impact will a large number of these factories make over a certain amount of time? To discover the answer to this question, engineers may build their own greenhouse prototype that represents the atmosphere of the

  Earth and release a small percentage of gas into it, recreating its effect on the atmosphere. This will allow everyone involved with the construction of the industrial machine or factory--from the engineers to environmentalists to scientists--to have some sense of what type of impact the pollution from this industry is having on the planet.

New Growing Methods

• Greenhouses are efficient ways to grow plants, crops and other types of fruits and vegetables in a controlled environment that is not as effected by wind, rain or cold as plants or crops in a field. This allows plants and crops to be grown in places they otherwise wouldn't be able to grow, which can help to make areas that were once difficult to live in because of lack of food suddenly inhabitable. However, greenhouses are often expensive to build and maintain in remote regions of the world. So engineers at places such as National Instruments have been working on ways to build greenhouses that are less expensive to construct and can easily be moved from location to location.

Space Exploration

• As humans look to other planets beyond Earth, engineers are turning to greenhouse construction to allow us to be able to generate oxygen on planets so that we can breathe the air. For example, engineers who are studying human settlement of Mars are already trying to figure out how to create inflatable greenhouses so that humans can generate oxygen, as well as grow plants and terraform the land. More work and experimentation will continue to be done with engineers and these inflatable greenhouses for use in space exploration.