Solar-Powered Automated IoT-Based Drip Irrigation System

Abstract

In India the main economic structure is based on the agriculture sector. Worldwide, India is in 2nd position regarding farm output. Irrigation is an important component of agriculture. In most of the cases, conventional electricity or diesel-generated electricity is used by the farmers to run the motors and pumps manually, resulting in over irrigation and wastage of water. The use of conventional energy resources like petrol, diesel, coal is expensive and also creates air pollution and noise. Hence nowadays maximum research works are focusing on utilization of renewable energy resources, which is widely available, like solar energy. Solar-powered irrigation system is not only eco friendly but also economically a cheap process. This process minimizes the operation and maintenance cost, which is 2–4 times higher than a solar photovoltaic (PV) pump. In most of the developing countries, agriculture is solely dependent on rain water and thus poorly affected in the season of summer. In India there are also some of the places where water availability is very low which has detrimental effects on crop production. Hence nowadays wireless sensors were used to analyze the moisture level of the field and to automate the irrigation process. An automated irrigation system refers a system, with a minimum of manual requirement. All types of irrigation process like drip irrigation, sprinkler irrigation or surface irrigation can be automated by using timers, sensors or computers or mechanical appliances. In this automated system, some standard data regarding the moisture level of a field is predefined for a specific crop. The sensor first transmits the data through a microcontroller to the server after a specific time interval. If the amount of moisture of the field is below the standard value of the database, the microcontroller will trigger the pump for watering the plants till the predefined moisture level. While the moisture level of the field reaches the threshold limit, the pump will automatically stop watering through microcontroller. The sensor analyzes the moisture level by monitoring the field in a specific time slot and store the data in database. Nowadays there are so many advancements taking place in sensing and communication technologies. Thus in today’s life solar-powered automated drip irrigation system can solve the problems of using conventional energy resources for running the irrigation system and also prevents the water wastage by continuous monitoring of the field.