Study on optimal start-up time and water usage volume of blowdown residue discharge of mesh filter

Abstract

The water volume used for blowdown of mesh filter is one of the important indicators to evaluate the economic benefit of a mesh filter. The amount of water used for drainage of the mesh filter can be controlled by setting the start-up time of the blowdown residue discharge of the mesh filter. Through the indoor prototype test, the sediment of the Manas Riverbed in Xinjiang, China was used as the filter medium to test the mesh filter and analyze the water usage volume at each stage. The test focused on the analysis of the trend of the pressure difference between the inlet and outlet of the mesh filter over the filtration time. The results showed that as the filtration time was prolonged, the inlet and outlet pressure difference of the mesh filter showed an S-shaped curve with time. The pressure difference between the inlet and outlet can be divided into 4 stages, i.e., the start of filtering to the first inflection point of the abrupt change in the pressure difference, the first inflection point of the abrupt pressure difference change to the median point of filtering, the median point of filtering to the second inflection point of the abrupt change in the pressure difference, and the second inflection point of the abrupt pressure difference change to the end of filtering. At the same time, the water usage volume for blowdown was calculated under various working conditions. This paper analyzed the start-up time of blowdown at three different time points, i.e., after the completion of the entire filtration cycle of the traditional mesh filter, at the first inflection point of pressure difference and at the second inflection point of pressure difference. The tests were performed under the condition that the filtration cycle of the mesh filter was 10 days. The results have shown that compared with the traditional screen filter that starts the blowdown at the end of the entire filtration cycle, starting the blowdown at the first inflection point of pressure difference can save 200–300 m3 of water resources for a single mesh filter, and starting the blowdown at the second inflection point of pressure difference can save 30–90 m3 of water resources for a single mesh filter. Meanwhile, the working conditions in the analyses in this paper were consistent with the actual engineering operating conditions. It is recommended that the mesh filter in the micro irrigation system can use the first inflection point of pressure difference to control the start-up time of the blowdown residue discharge, which can not only save water resources, but also ensure that the mesh filter runs at the optimal filtering conditions.

Editorial: Could advances in geoinformatics, irrigation management and climate adaptive agronomic practices ensure the sustainability of water supply in agriculture?

“…Successfully tested methods for improving irrigation efficiency for quantity (Hui et al 2021a(Hui et al , 2021b and quality (Jie et al 2021;Lemos et al 2021;Lima et al 2021;Tao et al 2021;Xie & Hung 2021;Zhang et al 2021) are also addressed as one of the utmost prospectives in agricultural water management. Notable results on hydraulic irrigation networks and equipment/systems (Samarinas & Evangelides 2021;Shi et al 2021;Sun et al 2021) are presented as well. Finally, this SI highlights the benefits in the adaptability of agronomical practices and decision-making systems to release climatic water effects on crops and ensure long-term stability of ecosystems (Biswas et al 2021;Economidou et al 2021;Gkiatas et al 2021;Morianou et al 2021b;Ragkos & Ambas 2021).…”