A study on modern farm irrigation systems Manufacture of two units for controlling drip irrigation automatically

Abstract

With the increasing world food shortage problems and limited water resource situation, the irrigation system is increasingly important to the purpose of increasing and stabilizing agriculture production. The primary reason• for irrigation crops is to supplement water available from natural sources of water, such as rainfall, dew, floods and ground water which seeps into the root zone. The amounts and timing of irrigation depend on several factors such as climatic, soil and crop.

This study, aimed to manufacture of two units for measuring available water and controlling the drip irrigation operation automatically and to calibrate and evaluate its performance under different field conditions. The effect of irrigation system, distance between laterals and emitter flow rate on the water relationships and the yield components was studied.

Two measuring ar.d controlling units were manufactured at Rice Mechanization Center, Kafr El-Sheikh Governorate, Egypt. The manufactured unit was calibrated under clay, sandy and sandy-loam soils and two types of sensors in addition to different depths namely: 15, 30 and 45 em. The soil of field work was clay soil. The type of emitter used was the single-exists in-line emitter. The emitters were spaced 50 em apart on the lateral.

Five irrigation systems namely: surface drip irrigation by using control unit, surface drip irrigation without control unit, sub-surface drip irrigation by using control unit, sub-surface drip irrigation without control unit and furrow irrigation were taken as the main experimental treatments. While the distances between laterals of about 60 and 120 em were taken as sub-treatments. On the other hand, the emitter flow rates of about 2 and 4 1/h were taken as sub-sub-treatments. The cucumber variety used was C-10. The present work covered three main aspects:

1- Calibration of manufactured unit.

2- Effect of operating pressure head and type of emitter on the following parameters: a) Emitter flow rate-pressure head relationship; b) Flow rate variation; c) Manufacturer coefficient of variation; d) Coefficient of uniformity and e) Distribution of uniformity.