Optimal Design and Testing of Pressure-compensated Drip Irrigation Emitter
WANG Xiaoli
AN Shengxin
SHANG Zhenqing
Abstract：[Objective]The emitter is a core component of drip irrigation and its performance affects the quality and life expectancy of the whole irrigation system. The objective of this paper is to present methods to improve the emitter design in attempts to resolve some problems commonly encountered in drip irrigation such as poor irrigation uniformity and emitter blockage, by optimizing the pressure compensation area and the flow channel structure in the emitter.[Method]The pressure-compensation emitter was taken as examples. We used silica gel to make the elastic diaphragm and calculated its associated structural parameters. Water flow through the system was simulated by the Ansys-Fluent, from which we analyzed the impact of channel structure on water velocity and pressure distribution, as well as the hydraulic characteristics under different structural parameters combinations. [Result]Analysis of the emitter manufactured based on the proposed methods showed that the manufacture deviation was 2.06％, the flow index was 0.048, and the irrigation uniformity was 96.34％.[Conclusion]The pressure-compensation emitter manufactured by the proposed methods improved the compensation efficiency and irrigation uniformity, and they can be also used to design other high efficient drip irrigation systems.
Keywords：pressure compensation emitterchannel structure optimizationpressure compensation areaemitter performance
Publication Date：2018-01-01
Online Publishing Date：2026-09-12(First online date of this platform, not the publication date of the document)
Pages：6( 65-70 )