A smart surface irrigation design based on the topographical and geometrical shape characteristics of the land

Abstract

Designing an efficient irrigation system on the farmland is a challenging issue which is dependent on many characteristics of the farmland. In this paper, the topographical and geometrical characteristics of the land are analyzed for designing an efficient furrow surface irrigation system. The topographical characteristics of the farmland can be changed in the cultivation process, so designing an efficient irrigation system requires modeling the last state of the topographical and geometrical characteristics of the land. The proposed method uses the digital elevation model, aspect of the slope and slope model of the land as topographical information and geometrical shape of the land as geometrical information. It designs the irrigation system at the field level for delivering water from the inlet of the land to the plants and uses a two steps designing strategy. First, the algorithm segments the land based on the topographical characteristics and geometrical shape into some plots. Then the ditches network is designed based on the topographical data and the geometrical shape of the land for providing water to the head ditch of each plot. The proposed method designs an efficient furrow irrigation system based on many well-known metrics. It was evaluated in an experimental field and compared with the traditional farmer designed irrigation system and two other normal irrigation systems. The evaluation shows that the proposed method can improve efficiency by decreasing the used water and irrigation time by about 50%.