Guidelines to Optimal Design of Furrow Irrigation Based on Plants, Soil and Furrow Specifications
Saeid Eslamian1, Kaveh Ostad-Ali-Askari2*, Mahboubeh Amoushahi-Khouzani3, Maryam Marani-Barzani4, Morteza Soltani5, Masoud Kazemi6, Amir Gandomkar7, Shahide Dehghan7,Nicolas R. Dalezios8, Vijay P. Singh9,Yohannes Yihdego10, Foroozan Rajaei-Rizi11,Hossein Norouzi12, Hamid-Reza Shirvani-Dastgerdi2, Arvin Jamshidi2, Arsalan Malekian2,Zahra Majidifar13, Mohsen Ghane14, Nasrin Zalaki-Badil15
Citation :Kaveh Ostad-Ali-Askari et.al., Guidelines to Optimal Design of Furrow Irrigation Based on Plants, Soil and Furrow Specifications International Journal of Constructive Research in Civil Engineering 2017,3(4) : 20-39.
In order to optimize the usage of water in agriculture, it is necessary to increase the efficiency of irrigation systems, especially those of surface irrigation. One of the steps to be made to achieve this goal is the optimal design of surface irrigation. It this article the design variables of furrow irrigation, that includes length of furrow, inflow rate and irrigation time (time of cut-off), were calculated to minimize the irrigation costs, the objective function, and to obtain a maximum application efficiency. The objective function encompasses water, labor, head ditch and furrow digging (ditch constructions) costs. Labor cost is irrigation time's function and the latter is dependent on water advance period in the furrows. Therefore, it is necessary for the objective function to apply explicit and accurate equation in order to calculate time of advance. Because in none of the accurate methods for furrow irrigation design, such as zero-inertia modeling, the advance time is explicitly calculated, therefore in this research the equation obtained by Valiantzas, which he extracted from the results of zero-inertia modeling, was used. In the objective function in addition to the design variables the specifications of soil, furrow and net irrigation requirement also exist. Therefore, it is possible to calculate design variables and afterwards the irrigation efficiency for different soil types and plant types. In this article this task was performed with different soil types and in accordance with different requirements for irrigation and the results are presented in the tables.