Control of individual microsprinklers and fault detection strategies

Abstract

Based on yield variability in orchards, it is evident that many trees receive too much or too little water and fertilizer under uniform management. Optimizing water and nutrient management based on the demand of individual trees could result in improved yield and environmental quality. A microsprinkler sensor and control system was developed to provide spatially variable delivery of water and fertilizer, and a prototype was installed in a nectarine orchard. Fifty individually addressable microsprinkler nodes, one located at every tree, each contained control circuitry and a valve. A drip line controller stored the irrigation schedule and issued commands to each node. Pressure sensors connected to some of the nodes provided lateral line pressure feedback. The system was programmed to irrigate individual trees for specific durations or to apply a specific volume of water at each tree. Time scheduled irrigation demonstrated the ability to provide microsprinkler control at individual trees, but also showed variation in discharge because of pressure differences between laterals. Volume scheduled irrigation used water pressure feedback to control the volume applied by individual microsprinklers more precisely, and the average error in application volume was 3.7%. Fault detection was used to check for damaged drip lines and clogged or damaged emitters. A pressure monitoring routine automatically logged errors and turned off the microsprinklers when drip line breaks and perforations caused pressure loss. Emitter diagnosis routines correctly identified clogged and damaged microsprinkler emitters in 359 of 366 observations. Irrigation control at the individual tree level has many useful features and should be explored further to characterize fully the benefits or disadvantages for orchard management.

Advance Research on Monitoring Of Soil & Remote Sensing of Vegetation by Various Techniques for Proper Drip Irrigation

“…Therefore, efficient water management plays an important role in the irrigated agricultural cropping systems [26], [43]. A site-specific wireless sensor-based irrigation control system is a potential solution to optimize yields and maximize water use efficiency for fields with variation in water availability due to different soil characteristics or crop water needs and site-specific controlling irrigation valves [3], [11], [27]. Temporal monitoring of soil moisture at different growth stages of the crop could prevent water stress and improve the crop yield [10], [14].…”

“…After the usage of wireless technology began in agricultural irrigation, a trial was made to involve different types of equipments in such instrumentations. In terms of controllers, [11], [12], [33] were designed microcontroller site-specific irrigation, wireless monitoring system was implemented with a field programmable gate array (FPGA) by [32].…”

Irrig-OH: An Open-Hardware Device for Soil Water Potential Monitoring and Irrigation Management

“…Irrigation devices for the continuous monitoring of soil water status are a potential solution to improve yields and increase WP, also in agricultural contexts with low water availability but high crop water requirements Coates et al, 2006a;Dursun and Ozden, 2011). Over the last 30 years, sensor-based irrigation solutions have been widely studied in many agricultural contexts, from orchard to ornamental plants (Stone et al, 1985;Jacobson et al, 1989;Zazueta and Smajstrla, 1992;Meron et al, 1995;Wyland et al, 1996;Testezlaf et al, 1997;Abreu and Pereira, 2002;Kim et al, 2008Kim et al, , 2009).…”

“…More recently, thanks to the development of informatics and telecommunication technologies, a number of studies focused on soil water status monitoring based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been developed (Oksanen et al, 2004;Zhang, 2004). In terms of automatic control of irrigation system components, Miranda et al (2003); Coates et al (2006a); Mendoza-Jasso et al (2005) and Coates et al (2006b) developed site-specific applications in which soil water status information was used for governing the electrovalves of irrigation systems.…”

A Remote Irrigation Monitoring and Control System for continuous move systems. Part A: description and development

“…Alternatively, different nozzle types or application rates are alternated, such as using a combination of nozzle application rates by location (''stepwise'' variable irrigation). Some examples of variable irrigation achieved on selfpropelled irrigation systems in the last eight years include Bordovsky and Lascano (2003), and Perry et al (2002Perry et al ( , 2004, and on fixed systems by Coates et al (2004Coates et al ( , 2006, and Miranda et al (2005). From these studies, three major needs are recognized: (a) that some sort of wireless communication among the irrigation controllers (on-irrigation-system computer and in-the-office ''server'' computer) is required in order to optimize the hydraulic operation of the irrigation system (Stone et al 2006;and Coates et al 2006); (b) that in-field variable soil water holding capacities demand remote spatial soil moisture monitoring in specific areas within the field, thus requiring an integrated irrigation control and monitoring system (Evans et al 2000); and (c) there is a critical research need to include improved decision support systems and monitoring and feedback to irrigation control in real time (Sadler et al 2005b).…”