DESIGN AND FIELD EVALUATION OF LOW COST WIRELESS SOIL MOISTURE SENSOR FOR AUTOMATION OF DRIP IRRIGATION SYSTEM
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Date
2017
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Publisher
Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University
Abstract
In our country, the irrigated area is about 36 per cent of the net sown area.
Presently, the agricultural sector accounts for about 83 percent of all water uses. The
remaining uses include 5, 3, 6 and 3 per cent respectively for domestic, industrial and
energy sectors and other consumers. Increasing competition with the other water users
in the future would limit the water availability for expanding irrigated area.
At the present era, the farmers have been using irrigation technique in rural areas
through the manual control in which the farmers irrigate the land at the regular intervals,
and also some rural areas are severely affected by droughts or floods. New technologies
are coming for the assured supply of water but they are too expensive for the common
farmer. One major reason of not adopting new technologies is unnecessary wastage of
water in agriculture field due to unawareness of farmers about sufficient supply of
water.
Farmers usually control the electric motors observing the soil, crop and weather
conditions by visiting the sites. These manually controlled irrigation systems cannot
ensure a proper level of water in the site. Another reason is due to the lack of electricity
and mismanagement in the manually controlling systems, sometimes their fields
become dry and sometimes flooded with excess water. Automatic drip irrigation system
allows farmers to apply the right amount of water at the right time, by turning the valves
on and off.
The GSM based wireless soil moisture sensor is designed using keil μvision 3
software into microcontroller for maximum of three sensors present in each field 466.4
sq m of tomato and 406 sq m of cluster bean and controls the water supply in the field to
be irrigated using solenoid valve. The sensor present in each field stops the pump
automatically through microcontroller when the field reaches to its field capacity and
the motor will be switched on automatically when soil moisture reaches 70% of field
capacity.
The experimental fields with an area of 466.4 m
2
for tomato crop and 406 m
2
for
cluster bean crops were selected at field irrigation laboratory, Department of Soil and
Water Engineering, College of Agricultural Engineering, Bapatla. The field was divided
into 3 sub plots for tomato and cluster bean crops respectively to conduct experiments
on drip irrigation with low cost wireless soil moisture sensor. The crop duration for
tomato crop and cluster bean was 120 days (Dec 20th 2016 to March 3rd, 2017) and 90
days (March 24th to June 21st, 2017) respectively. The water was applied as per the crop
water requirement calculated by CROPWAT in flood irrigation method, whereas water
application was done based on operation of automatic wireless soil moisture sensor in
both single row and paired row drip irrigation systems. The inline drip laterals were
arranged with each dripper flow rate of 2 lph and spacing between drippers is 0.4 m.
Field data was collected regularly to evaluate the performance of low cost soil moisture
sensor based GSM and benefit cost ratio was found for different irrigation systems used
for both tomato and cluster bean crops.
The results revealed that the yield response was observed to be the best in
wireless soil moisture sensor based irrigation with each row lateral spacing in tomato
crop as 2.902 t ha-1
. The yield in tomato crop was very less as compared to normal
yields. This is due to the reason that crop was affected by blight and tomato spotted wilt
virus and final harvest was done about one month before the actual harvest date (April
8
th). Water applied in drip irrigation system using soil moisture sensor was found to be
410 mm instead of 490 mm in flood method for tomato and 16.39 % water saving was
observed. In cluster bean, the yield was best in single row drip method as 7.5 t ha-1
.
Water applied in drip irrigation system using wireless soil moisture sensor was found to
be 410 mm instead of 507 mm in flood method and 19.13 % water saving was
observed. Less water saving was observed because of crops are grown in sandy soils.
The total cost of the GSM based low cost wireless soil moisture sensor was Rs 3424/- .
Water use efficiency for tomato crop is highest in single row drip method with
7.15 kg/ha-mm followed by paired row drip and flood method as 6.25 and 2.24 kg/hamm
respectively. Whereas in cluster bean, the water use efficiency was highest in single
row drip method as 18.29 kg/ha-mm followed by paired row drip and flood method as
14.55 and 8.71 kg/ha-mm respectively.
For tomato crop cultivation the total annual cost for the drip system was
Rs.24000. The benefit cost ratio of 0.81 was recorded for single row followed by 0.79
for paired row and the least value of benefit cost ratio was recorded in flood as 0.53. For
cluster bean crop cultivation the total annual cost for the drip system was Rs.20000. The
benefit cost ratio of 2.12 was recorded for single row followed by 2.14 for paired row
and the least value of benefit cost ratio was recorded in flood as 2.06.
Keywords: GSM, wireless soil moisture sensor, microcontroller, keil μvision3,
automatic drip irrigation
Description
D5468
Keywords
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