Design of reservoir tanks modelling to mix several types of fertilizer for fertigation planting system: Part b

Abstract

Fertigation is a process that combines fertilization and irrigation by injecting soil amendments, fertilizers, and other water-soluble products into an irrigation system. . In order to achieve the higher productivity and maintaining environmental quality in agriculture, water and nutrients are the two most critical inputs. The importance of fertigation system is to control the salinity and pH value of fertilizer solution. In Malaysia, manual method is used in order to mix the fertilizer solution and manually takes the reading of EC and pH of the solution. This research is to develop a fertigation system that can mix several types of fertilizer and to design a system that can mix the concentration and pH value of fertilizer using Arduino system and PID controller. Electrical conductivity and pH sensor will be immersed in the main tank and start to give a feedback. When the controller detects an error, it will do a correction to the system. In this research, several conditions of PID parameter were used to conduct the experiment. Different parameters of PID would give different result and settling time. The best settling time was when the experiment was conducted using PID parameter of KP = 50, KI = 150, KD = 3 which took 130s to mix the fertilizer solution. When the experiment was conducted using KP = 50, KI = 10, KD = 3, the settling became longer which took 250s to recover the desired salinity and pH range of value. From the finding result, it proves that this system can control and give feedback to the change of salinity and pH value.