Abstract
In a variety of agricultural activities, such as irrigation scheduling and nutrient management, soil water content is regarded as an essential parameter. Either power supply or long-distance cable is hardly available within field scale. For the necessity of monitoring soil water dynamics at field scale, this study presents a wireless soil moisture sensor based on the impedance transform of the frequency domain. The sensor system is powered by solar energy, and the data can be instantly transmitted by wireless communication. The sensor electrodes are embedded into the bottom of a supporting rod so that the sensor can measure soil water contents at different depths. An optimal design with time executing sequence is considered to reduce the energy consumption. The experimental results showed that the sensor is a promising tool for monitoring moisture in large-scale farmland using solar power and wireless communication.
Highlights
Soil water content plays an important role in governing crop growth and yield
Low cost implementations of resistive based sensors have been suggested in the past[15,16], commercial implementations of these devices are expensive, lack integrated data-logging capabilities, or are unavailable
We developed a soil moisture sensor that does not require external cables but rather uses a solar battery for power supply and a wireless transceiver module for data transmission, and a field evaluation was conducted
Summary
Soil water content plays an important role in governing crop growth and yield. The serious water shortage in Northern China requires a more efficient way of agricultural water resources development. There is a wide range of electrically based soil moisture measurement techniques established in the fields of geophysical surveying [5,6] and agronomy[7,8,9]. These include resistivity based methods[10,11]; capacitance based methods such as Frequency Domain Reflectometry (FDR)[12]; Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR)[13]; as well as Radiation based techniques[14]. With the rapid development of information and communication technology, Wireless Sensor Network (WSNs), as a new information acquisition and processing technology, has been widely used in real life[17,18]
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