Evaluation of Subsurface Drip Irrigation Designs in a Soil Profile with a Capillary Barrier

Koichi Noguchi,Hirotaka Saito,Reskiana Saefuddin,Jiří Šimůnek

doi:10.3390/w13091300

Abstract

Enhanced water use efficiency (WUE) is the key to sustainable agriculture in arid regions. The installation of capillary barriers (CB) has been suggested as one of the potential solutions. CB effects are observed between two soil layers with distinctly different soil hydraulic properties. A CB helps retain water in the upper, relatively fine-textured soil layer, suppressing water losses by deep drainage. However, retaining water in a shallow surface layer also intensifies water loss by evaporation. The use of subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) with a CB may prevent such water loss. This study evaluated the performance of SDI in a soil profile with a CB using a pot experiment and numerical analysis with the HYDRUS (2D/3D) software package. The ring-shaped emitter was selected for the SDI system for its low capital expenditures (CapEx) and maintenance. Strawberry was selected as a model plant. The results indicated that the proposed SDI system with a CB was effective in terms of WUE. The numerical analysis revealed that the CB’s depth influences the system’s water balance more than the ring-shaped emitter’s installation depth. While the CB’s shallow installation led to more root water uptake by the strawberry and less water loss by deep drainage, it induced more water loss by evaporation.

Highlights

In semi-arid and arid regions, agricultural production is dependent on vulnerable water resources
The soil water dynamics at S3 followed the same pattern after a quasi-linear increase in volumetric water contents (VWC)
Saefuddin et al [20] reported that the VWC 5 cm above the ring-shaped emitter in the sand profile did not increase during the 24-hour experiment

Summary

Introduction

In semi-arid and arid regions, agricultural production is dependent on vulnerable water resources. The installation of Capillary Barriers (CB) has been suggested as a promising engineering approach to improve agricultural water use efficiency (WUE) [5,6,7,8,9,10]. When a fine-textured layer overlies a coarse-textured layer, the water in the fine-textured layer does not infiltrate into the coarsetextured layer if the capillary forces in the fine-textured layer are significantly stronger, retaining moisture in the fine-textured layer. This is due to the coarse material having much larger pore sizes. The capillary forces of the fine-textured layer match those of the coarse-textured layer so that liquid water can infiltrate from the layer above a CB into the CB layer [11]

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Conclusion