PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF MODIFIED SOIL MOISTURE SENSOR BASED AUTOMATED DRIP IRRIGATION SYSTEM AT IGKV RAIPUR
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Date
2020
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Indira Gandhi Krishi Vishwavidyalaya, Raipur (C.G.)
Abstract
India is an agriculture dominant country, in which 70% of it rural households depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood. Agriculture is a sector that consumes approx. 70-80% of potable water for irrigation of its field and moreover farmers irrigate their land by traditional irrigation methods like surface irrigation method in which majority amount of water gets wasted. So, as the water is getting scarce day by day it’s important to conserve water. Therefore to overcome this problem drip along with soil moisture sensor can be used which delivers water as per the plants requirement, thereby it can prevent from having over and under irrigation due to which it not only saves water but also increases the production of the crop.
This research work entitled “Performance evaluation of modified soil moisture sensor based automated drip irrigation system at IGKV Raipur” was carried out at the experimental field of Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Dept. of Soil and Water Engineering, Swami Vivekanand College of Agricultural Engineering and Technology, IGKV, Raipur, C.G. The major objective of the experiment was to modify and set up the developed soil moisture sensor system for real-time monitoring of moisture content of the soil, to calibrate the modified soil moisture sensor system in drip irrigation, and to perform the performance evaluation of modified soil moisture sensor under drip irrigation method at IGKV Raipur.
The soil sample of experimental field was taken for doing soil test was done and the laboratory test results shows that the texture of the soil sample is sandy clay having 31% field capacity and 1.32 g cc-1 bulk density. To calibrate the soil moisture sensor and to measure the soil moisture content, the gravimetric method and Soil Moisture Meter were used. The soil moisture sensor was calibrated in terms of volumetric moisture content (VMC) by using gravimetric method between 90-70% of the field capacity of the soil.
Automation of installed drip irrigation was done by equipping the drip with a low-cost soil moisture sensor system. The pre-developed sensor system was modified to use in this study. It was designed and developed to schedule the irrigation automatically in the experimental field and were tested for brinjal crop. In this system, 5 sensors were installed in the experimental field of sandy clay texture at a different soil depth of 0-15, 15-30, 30-40, 40-45, and 45-60 cm respectively from the soil surface. The placement of sensors at various depth depends upon the growth stage of the plants. The reading of the soil moisture was recorded from the experimental field on daily basis and these readings were also compared with gravimetric method. For optimum scheduling of irrigation, the sensor system was set at 70-90% of the VMC of the soil.
The sensor based automated drip irrigation system automatically turned the pump “ON” whenever the moisture content in soil reduces below the pre-set moisture content that is 70% and it will irrigate the field till the moisture content reaches up to the pre-set upper moisture content limit that is 90% of the field capacity. When the moisture content of the soil reaches 90% of the field capacity the sensor system cut off the irrigation by turning “OFF” the pump automatically. In this way, only the required amount of water was applied whenever the plants needed it, which results in saving of water. The sensor continuously monitors the soil moisture content and displays the real time average moisture content with the help of the 3.5 inches TFT LCD display unit. The program for the microcontroller in the sensor system was done by the help of software which was done by the Automation Engineers.
Irrigation of experimental field was done with the help of pump operated drip irrigation system having a 2000 l capacity of tank as a source of water. The experiment consisted of two type of treatments, i.e. Controlled irrigation treatment (Furrow irrigation) and Soil moisture sensor based treatment. In controlled irrigation treatment irrigation was applied according to the farmers practice and field conditions where as in sensor based treatment the irrigation water is applied according to the moisture content of the field as the soil moisture sensor continuously monitors the moisture content of the soil. There were total 8 rows of plants under controlled irrigation treatment whereas there were 20 rows of plants under sensor based drip irrigation method. The wetting patterns were measured at 1.0 kg/cm2 operating pressure. The measurement of wetted depth and width were recorded at 30, 60, 90, & 120 min. of application of water. The vertical wetting front advance were obtained maximum at 4.9, 9.6, 11.6, and 9.8 cm and the horizontal wetting front advance were found maximum at 13.1, 14.8, 19.2, and 23.8 cm, through the emitters having 1.31 lph discharge at 1.0 kg/cm2 operating pressure.
The discharge from drip irrigation with inline emitters was calculated at various places in the experimental field at the interval of 10 min. at various operating pressure (i.e. at 0.5,0.7, 0.9 and 1.0 kg cm-2) for estimating installed drip irrigation system’s hydraulic performance, on the basis of uniformity coefficient, Irrigation Efficiencies, Emission Uniformity, and Emitter Flow Variation. According to the field observations and calculation the hydraulic performance of installed drip irrigation system were obtained maximum at 1.0 kg/cm2 operating pressure in which Application Efficiency was 93.24%, Distribution Efficiency was 95.47%, Emission Uniformity was 94.73%, and Uniformity Coefficient was 94.18% obtained. It also has been observed that, there was continues increment in growth characteristics which were also affected by different treatments of irrigation. For soil moisture sensor based automated treatment various growth characteristics was obtained such as, maximum height of plant recorded as 121.1 cm, average length of fruit was 14 cm, number of branch per plant was 21, yield per plant was 856 gm, no. of fruits per plant 15.42, average fruit weight was 52.15 gm, and water use efficiency 81.71 kg/ha-mm was recorded. For Controlled Irrigation Treatment, the avg. no. of branches per plant were 14, the average weight of fruit 52.15 gm, the avg. no. of fruits per plant 16.81, yield per plant was 754 gm, maximum height of plant obtained was 98.4 cm, Water Use Efficiency (WUE) was recorded as 66.2 kg/ha-mm and the average fruit length was 12 cm was obtained. Whereas. The maximum Water Use Efficiency (WUE) was recorded highest (81.71 kg/ha-mm) for soil moisture sensor based automated treatment. The total depth of applied water in case of controlled irrigation was 635 mm and for sensor based treatment it was 550 mm which clearly shows more water applied in controlled irrigation treatment. The sensor based treatment saves around 13.38% of water as compared to controlled irrigation method.
Description
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF MODIFIED SOIL MOISTURE SENSOR BASED AUTOMATED DRIP IRRIGATION SYSTEM AT IGKV RAIPUR