Comparison of Ray Tracing Software Performance Based on Light Intensity for Spinach Growth

With the development of modern agricultural technology, plant factories have become an important way to achieve efficient and sustainable crop production. Accurate understanding of the light received by plants is the key to improving the light energy utilization efficiency of lamps and ensuring the benefits of plant factories. Ray tracing technology, as one of the key technologies in plant factories, is of great significance to analyze the growing light environment of vegetables. Spinach has high nutritional value and is loved by the public and is one of the main crops grown in plant factories. In this paper, LightTools, TracePro, and Ansys Lumerical FDTD Solution, which are currently mature light environment tracking software in the field of lighting, are selected as the research objects to investigate their performance in simulating the light environment of spinach leaf surfaces under different planting arrangements and different lamp source distances. The results show as follows: Under the rectangular planting arrangement, the leaves received more light, and the plants grew faster. Different planting arrangements of plants had little effect on the simulation effect of the same kind of software, but the simulation effect of the three kinds of software under the same planting arrangement was significantly different, and the difference between the simulated value and the measured value of TracePro was the least. Further, TracePro was used to trace and simulate the leaf surface light conditions of spinach under a rectangular planting arrangement at different lighting distances, and the simulation results showed that there was no significant difference between the software simulation value and the measured value, and the simulation accuracy was the highest when the distance from the light source was 30 cm. Therefore, TracePro software can accurately simulate the light intensity of spinach leaves during the growth process and is most suitable for monitoring the change of light environment of spinach growth in plant factories.