An assessment of hydraulic design of micro-irrigation systems

Abstract

The hydraulic design of micro-irrigation systems to achieve high system uniformity has led design engineers to over-design irrigation systems arbitrarily. Commonly used emitter flow variations of 10–20% are equivalent to a uniformity coefficient of about 98-95%, or a coefficient of variation of emitter flow of only 3–7%. The uniformity of a micro-irrigation system is affected by not only hydraulic design but also manufacturer's variation, grouping of emitters, plugging, soil hydraulic characteristics and emitter spacings. Among all the factors affecting the uniformity, the hydraulic design, with an emitter flow variation of 10–20%, produces only a few percent change in uniformity. The manufacturer's variation of micro-irrigation emitters ranges from 2% to 20%. The hydraulic variation will be less significant when an emitter with 10% or more manufacturer's variation is selected. The grouping effect will reduce the coefficient of variation to half or more if four or more emitters can be grouped together. The effect of hydraulic design is also less significant with plugging situations. When there is no plugging, the emitter flow variation from 10% to 20% in hydraulic design will reduce spatial uniformity only about 8% from 93% to 85% when the emitter spacing is designed as half of the wetting diameter in the field. The hydraulic design criterion can be relaxed to 30%v of emitter flow variation, q var(H), which can still achieve less than 20%v in coefficient of variation, or over 80% of uniformity coefficient in spatial uniformity of a micro-irrigation system