Design of an automatic furrow irrigation system utilising adaptive real-time control

Abstract

An automated adaptive irrigation system was developed for furrow irrigation. The system estimates the soil infiltration characteristics in real time and utilises the data to control the same irrigation event to give optimum performance for the current soil conditions. The main components of the system are: a microcomputer running a hydraulic simulation program based on the full hydrodynamic model; a pressure sensitive transducer (PST) to measure pressure head in the supply system continuously and hence determine the flow rate; and water advance sensor placed approximately midway down the furrow. A modem is attached to the microcomputer enabling it to receive signals from the PST and advance sensor via radio telemetry system. The system was trialled in a furrow-irrigated commercial cotton property utilising both siphon and pipe-through-the-bank (PTB) water application methods. The initial observations from these trials are presented in this paper. These results demonstrate that improvements in water use efficiency and labour savings are potentially achievable through the use of the system.