In an effort to establish a dynamic simulation environment for life support system design and optimization, the "Virtual Habitat" tool is being developed by the Human Spaceflight Group of the Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM). As plants will play a vital role in future space exploration missions, a complete plant growth model has been developed, based on the SUCROS model developed at University of Wageningen. The paper describes the plant model and in particular the interactions between a plant and its environment. The model developed is sensitive to many environmental conditions: temperature, light intensity, humidity, water content in soil, atmosphere composition. The main outputs of the plant model are the mass of the main organs of the plant together with CO_2, O_2 and H_2O exchanged with the environment. A closed environment model has been developed to simulate the interaction between the plants and a closed environment. When the 'Virtual Habitat' will reach its full capabilities it will be possible to simulate the interactions between humans, plants and P/C life support system in closed environment to study stability and optimum control laws. In this paper the results of the first basic simulations are presented to validate the approach.
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