Hydraulic Performance of a Solar-Powered Drip Irrigation System

Abstract

The effect of emitter type and operating pressure on some hydraulic properties of a solar-powered drip irrigation system, under three types of dots, Turbo, Spiral, and GR, and three operating pressures100, 150 and 200 cm piezo meters were used. The results showed an increase in the values of the emitters discharge rate, emission consistency, and the decrease in the values of the variance ratio in the discharge and the coefficient of manufacturing variation by increasing the operating pressure for the Turbo, Spiral and GR emitters, respectively. The highest values of the droplet discharge rate were 4.98 and 5.56 L.hr-1 for GR and Spiral compared to 7.31L.hr-1 for Turbo type. The results showed that the operational pressures had a significant effect on increasing the rate of discharge and the consistency of the emission and decreasing the values of the rate of synthetic variation and the percentage of variation in the discharge, as the lowest coefficient of variation was 0.0260, 0.0393 and 0.0436 for the Turbo, Spiral and GR emitter, respectively. The use of different operating pressures led to an increase in the rate of discharge as well as the values of consistency of the flow and reduced the percentages of variation in expenses and the coefficient of manufacturing variation of the drippers. The average expenditure values were 3.732, 4.679 and 5.952 liters.hour-1 for operating pressures 100, 150 and 200 cm, respectively. The emission consistency values were also increased and were 91.11, 93.78 and 95.53%, and the coefficient of variation ratios were reduced by 32.13, 17.08 and 8.89% for the aforementioned operating pressures.