3D Printable Hydroponics: A Digital Fabrication Pipeline for Soilless Plant Cultivation

Recently, 3D printing techniques have been devised to fabricate a range of functional systems, e.g., mechanical/electronic apparatuses, biological tissues, etc. Further building upon this trend, in this paper we describe a pipeline to digitally fabricate hydroponic systems, that support the cultivation of various plant species without the use of soil. The pipeline outputs a freeform 3D landscape with plant seeds attached onto its surface; by providing this printed foundation with adequate water and light (and later nutrient solutions), eventually the plants will grow, with the foundation effectively serving as a growth medium through which roots can permeate. The pipeline is flexible, and can be customized to suit different scales and applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline through quantitative evaluations, and also provide a list of plants that have been successfully cultivated using our technique. The paper will conclude with a discussion on how the pipeline may be further extended to realize fabrication of more complex ecological systems.