Different strategies are reported in the literature for energy saving in Closed Plant Production Systems (CPPS). However, not reliable evidences about energy consumption with the use of pulsed LED light technique in lighting system available in Plant Factory and Vertical Farm. In this work, three key points to determine the effects of pulsed LED light versus continuous LED light are presented: (1) A mathematical model and its practical application for stabilizing the energy equivalence using LED light in continuous and pulsed mode in different light treatments. (2) The quantum efficiency of the photosystem II was used to determine positive and/or negative effects of the light operating mode (continuous or pulsed) on chili pepper plants (Capsicum annuum var. Serrano). (3) Evaluation of energy consumption with both operation modes using ten recipes from the literature to grow plants applied in Closed Plant Production Systems, different Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density at 50, 110, and 180 µmol m⁻² s⁻¹, Frequencies at 100, 500, and 1000 Hz, and Duty Cycles of 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90%. The results show no significant statistical differences between the operation modes (continuous and pulsed LED light). For each light recipe analyzed, a pulsed frequency and a duty cycle were obtained, achieving significant energy savings in every light intensity. The results can be useful guide for real-life applications in CPPS.

The effects of pulsed light based-LEDs at eleven frequencies (0.1, 1, 10, 50, 100, 500 Hz, 1, 5, 10, 50 and 100 kHz) programmed at 50 % duty cycle were analyzed, obtaining important parameters of the fluorescence emission of chlorophyll such as: maximum fluorescence (Fm′), minimum fluorescence, the fluorescence emission in steady state, maximum efficiency of PSII (Fv′/Fm′), the fraction of PSII centers that are open, photochemical quenching, nonphotochemical quenching (NPQ), quantum efficiency of photosystem II (ΦPSII), electron transport rate (ETR) and quantum yield of CO₂ assimilation (ϕCO₂). For the study and validation of the results obtained in the experiments, the analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied 0for each parameter with confidence intervals of 95 %. The results show that the frequencies of pulsed light had positive and negative effects on the fluorescence parameters with respect to the control treatment (continuous light). The frequencies that generated the best performance of Fv′/Fm′, NPQ, ΦPSII, ETR, ϕCO₂ in tomato plants were 0.1, 1, 100 Hz, and 1 kHz. The increase obtained in these parameters can represent an optimal growth and productivity conditions for optimal energy consumption.

Nowadays, lifestyle change is one of the problems of the new world economic order, and the procedures of feeding, purchasing, preparation, and the storage of food products, are forcing authorities to establish more rigorous methods concerning the control of food quality and safety. Owing quality in the agro-food sector is a complex and global issue, due to the distance between production and final consumption, as well as the new demands of society on food. Contributing to the bacteria minimization during their path in the supply chain, the objective of this research is the use of an UV-C LED artificial lighting system with emission in continuous light (CL) and two of pulsed light (Mode 1 and Mode 2) for fresh products’ disinfection. A mathematical model is introduced as a reference to establish the equivalence dose of continuous and pulsed UV-C LED irradiation. The doses applied were 5, 15, and 25 mJ cm⁻². The configured parameters per each technique were the irradiance, time also the frequency (500 Hz), and duty cycle (30, 50, and 80%) for Mode 1 and Mode 2. The germicidal effect (GE), energy consumption, and effective germicidal effect (EGE), were evaluated for the different techniques. According to the results, the technique Mode 1 was the best in the GE with 1.06 ± 0.01 and 1.08 ± 0.01 Log reduction by 25 mJ cm⁻² at 30 and 80% duty cycle, correspondingly. The CL and Mode 1 showed an outstanding performance with the EGE. Finally, Mode 1 reduced 11% in energy and the GE is comparable with CL. The pulsed light technique Mode 1 constitutes a powerful method against the microorganism’s destruction and a strategy for saving energy during the treatment. The UV-C LEDs proved to be an excellent alternative in the disinfection of fresh products with pulsed light emission in the real process.

This work reports on membranes of a combination of chitosan–starch with lithium-modified multiwall carbon nanotubes. One of the most important contributions of this article is the functionalization of the surface of multiwall carbon nanotubes by means of an accessible technique that allows for high grafting yields of lithium and their incorporation into a polymeric matrix. The natural compounds chitosan and starch were used as a support to embed the nanotubes, forming membranes with good mechanical stability. A thorough characterization via Raman, infrared and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopies, transmission and scanning electron microscopies and dynamic mechanical analysis is presented here, as well as electrochemical characterization. The composition, structure and mechanical stability of the membranes make them viable candidates to be used as anodes sustainable Li-ion batteries.

A new technique based on the Band-Limited Phase-Only Correlation (BLPOC) function to deal with acoustic individual identification is proposed in this paper. This is a biometric technique suitable for limited data individual bird identification. The main advantage of this new technique, in contrast to traditional algorithms where the use of large-scale datasets is assumed, is its ability to identify individuals by the use of only two samples from the bird species. The proposed technique has two variants (depending on the method used to analyze and extract the bird vocalization from records): automatic individual verification algorithm and semi-automatic individual verification algorithm. The evaluation of the automatic algorithm shows an average precision that is over 80% for the identification comparatives. It is shown that the efficiencies of the algorithms depend on the complexity of the vocalizations.

Heavy metal contamination, particularly lead (Pb), represents a threat to ecosystems and human health. This study investigates the variety Aloe vera var. Chinensis as a plant sensing platform for detecting the presence of lead by characterizing its bioelectrical response. A low-cost system based on Arduino was developed to acquire real-time electrical signals from 160 plants, equally divided between two groups: control conditions (n = 80) and Pb acetate exposure (500 mg/L; n = 80). Two recording sessions per plant were obtained after the plant had stabilized, resulting in 320 labeled measurements. The signals were characterized using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), autoregressive (AR) models, and complexity measures based on entropy. Three classifiers—Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and XGBoost—were trained and evaluated using five-fold cross-validation and a held-out test set with plant disjoint samples. XGBoost achieved the highest performance (accuracy = 93.0%; precision = 92.5%; recall = 93.8%; F1-score = 93.1%; and 95% CI for accuracy: 90.4–95.2% via bootstrap), significantly outperforming the other models. SHAP analysis revealed that midscale wavelet entropy and energy features, along with AR residual variance, were the most discriminative for Pb detection. These findings demonstrate a scalable, low-cost, and interpretable biosensing framework with potential applications in real-time environmental monitoring and early detection of heavy metal contamination.