A closed-loop VOC and ethylene monitoring system with activated-carbon scrubbing for sealed plant-growth chambers, developed to address a specific gap in NASA's Advanced Plant Habitat hardware for long-duration bioregenerative life support.

Problem

Sealed plant-growth environments for long-duration spaceflight have a problem the open-field versions don't: ethylene and other volatile organic compounds produced by the plants themselves accumulate to levels that inhibit growth, trigger premature senescence, and compromise crop yield. NASA's current Advanced Plant Habitat lacks integrated real-time VOC sensing coupled to active scrubbing; the hardware can detect the problem or clean the air, but doesn't close the loop between measurement and response. For a Mars-transit-duration mission where resupply is impossible, that loop matters.

Role

[NEED: specific role on the team — sensor integration? Scrubber design? Control software? Literature review?]. Part of Purdue's VIP AAMED team.

Approach

[NEED: Most of this section — specifically what you're contributing. I can infer the general architecture from what you've described, but I don't want to write engineering claims you haven't earned yet. At minimum, I need: what sensors (MOS-type VOC sensor? Specific ethylene-selective sensor?), what the scrubbing mechanism is beyond "activated carbon" (regenerable? Single-pass?), what the control loop looks like (threshold-triggered? PID? Time-averaged?), and what you specifically have designed, prototyped, or tested versus what is still research phase.]

Outcome

[NEED: current deliverable — is this at lit-review stage, design stage, prototype stage, or published?]

Limitations

Until the flagged technical details are filled from lab notes or publications, treat this page as a project framing document, not a verified engineering specification of the implemented system.