Engineering Themes: Kinetic Hydroponics

Armour College of Engineering Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Fouad Teymour, will be giving a Health Engineering Themes Lecture on "Kinetic Hydroponics".

Malnutrition is one of the greatest obstacles to development in many areas around the world. Among all natural food products available on the market, sprouts offer the highest nutrient density and could substantially contribute to combating malnutrition when used creatively as an add-on to recipes being served to children and malnourished adults. Engineering solutions can be used towards the development of more efficient and safer processes for sprouting at all scales. My research group at IIT has conceptualized and developed a novel technology for sprouting, termed Kinetic Hydroponics, that uses a full-immersion analog of hydroponic technology for the production of sprouts from seeds, grains, and beans. This technique not only provides efficient, controlled and simple ways for providing nutrition, carbon dioxide and sunlight to the growing sprouts, but also offers additional advantages including the ability to implement a controllable process for continuous disinfection and prevention of pathogenic activity, simplicity of operation, minimal need for supervision and, most importantly for the industrial scale, the minimization of the spatial footprint of the process.

Earn Engineering Themes Credit in Health for attending.