Design and Development of Automatic Drip Irrigation System

An automatic irrigation control system has been designed to facilitate the automatic supply of adequate of water from a reservoir to field or domestic crops in all agricultural seasons. One of the objectives of this work is to see how human control could be removed from irrigation and also to optimize the use of water in the process. The method employed is to continuously monitor the soil moisture level to decide whether irrigation is needed, and how much water is needed in the soil. A pumping mechanism is used to deliver the needed amount of water to the soil. The work can be grouped into four subsystems namely; power supply, sensing unit, control unit and pumping subsystems which make up the automatic irrigation control system. A moisture sensor was constructed to model the electrical resistance of the soil; a regulated 12 volts power supply unit was constructed to power the system; the control circuit was implemented using operational aurdino; and the pumping subsystem consisting of a centrifugal self-priming water pump was constructed using a small ac-operated motor. System response tests were carried out to determine the time taken for the system to irrigate potted samples of different soil types having different levels of dryness.