DEVELOPMENT OF A SOFTWARE TO DETERMINE THE EMITTER CHARACTERISTICS AND THE OPTIMUM LENGTH OF NEW DESIGNED DRIP IRRIGATION LATERALS

An appropriate design of a drip irrigation system in order to increase the uniformity of water distribution with a high efficiency is of importance. The first step for the design is the determination of suitable length of laterals. In order to do this, the emitter characteristics and the friction losses of new designed laterals on which the emitters are placed must be known by laboratory experiments. On the other hand, mathematical models developed can also be used for the determination of friction losses in drip irrigation laterals. In this study, a software in Visual Basic 6.0 programming language was developed and it helps analyzing the data from a new designed emitter in order to find out the main characteristics and friction losses and to obtain the optimum lateral length of the lateral in the shortest time with an acceptable accuracy in. The software included several options for the selection of in-line or on-line emitter type, pressure compensating or non-pressure compensating emitters. The software calculates the optimum lateral length based on the measurement and model equations and utilizes the step by step procedure. Optimum lateral length criterias in the software such as Cu and qvar for non-pressure compensating emitter and lateral end pressure for compensating emitter were used. The comparison of optimum lateral lengths indicated a very good agreement between the experimentally obtained results and the results from the use of mathematical models for different criteria and different slope conditions. The differences in optimum lateral lengths between the experimental and calculated values obtained from the mathematical models ranged between -0.4 and 0.7%.