DEVELOPMENT OF TIME BASED AUTOMATIC  IRRIGATION SYSTEM FOR DRIP  2957

KAPUPARA PARTH JAYANTILA

DEVELOPMENT OF TIME BASED AUTOMATIC IRRIGATION SYSTEM FOR DRIP 2957

Date

2019-08

Authors

KAPUPARA PARTH JAYANTILA

Publisher

JAU, JUNAGADH

Abstract

India has been traditionally an agriculture-based economy and agriculture is the largest consumer of water. Hence, efficient irrigation system is the need of the present era to avoid wastage of water. Drip is the most efficient irrigation system in which water can only be saved if it is operated properly based on need of the crop. Human error can be neglected by adopting automation in drip system. The present study is emphasized to develop low cost automatic irrigation system which can be easily operated remotely using web based mobile application. Web based mobile application computes the time of operation for drip system based on crop evapotranspiration (ETc) and controller controls the whole drip system to irrigate the field for the calculated time. Crop coefficient (Kc) values of eggplant and tomato crop was stored in web based mobile application which is used to calculate crop evapotranspiration. Arduino Mega 2560 was used as controller of the automatic system and ESP8266 Node MCU Wi-Fi module was used to connect controller with internet. To validate the developed system, time of operation calculated by web based application (Tapp) and actual time of operation require to irrigating the field (Treq) was computed by simulating eggplant and tomato crop setup. The developed system tested in the field, the difference between Tapp and Treq was found statistically non-significant when applying two sample t-test. Nash Sutcliffe model efficiency coefficient (ME) of 0.9906 and 0.9932 was found for Tapp and Treq of eggplant and tomato set up respectively which indicates the good match between Tapp and Treq. Hence, automatic irrigation system can be considered as best for irrigation of field. The estimated cost of smart irrigation controller is ₹ 2650. Payback period of automatic drip irrigation system is four months. Hydraulic performance of 8 lph emitter was also carried out at different operating pressure to test the system in the field condition. The uniformity coefficient, coefficient of manufacturing variation and emission uniformity were falls in categories of excellent and very good in the test as per the ASABE standard and better results were at 1.00 kg/cm2 operating pressure.