Drip irrigation techniques to mitigate the dripper clogging in wastewater irrigation.

Author(s)

Denis Cesar Cararo

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Piracicaba.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz (ESALA/BC)
• Defense date: 2004-10-18

Examining board members

Tarlei Arriel Botrel; Rubens Duarte Coelho; Sergio Nascimento Duarte; Fernando Campos Mendonça; Jose Euclides Stipp Paterniani

• Advisor: Tarlei Arriel Botrel

Abstract

The sustainable management of water resources, given the current and projected severe water shortages, requires that appropriate methods of water usage be implemented. One of these is the application of treated wastewater to agricultural land using drip irrigation systems, which is safe and among the most resource efficient methods of irrigation. However, the use of drip irrigation with wastewater is constrained by the potential for clogging in the emitters. To elucidate the mechanism of clogging, fifteen drip emitters models from different manufacturers were tested with secondary treated wastewater in the laboratory and two field experiments were conducted to evaluate emitters and treatments according to the degree of clogging (DC) and flow rate coefficient of variation (CVq). The treatments were control (filtrage only), chlorination (0.5 mg L-1 free residual chlorine injected at the end of each irrigation cycle), compressed air (1.96 kPa in the inlet drippers) and the chlorine and compressed air combination. The manufacture coefficient of variation was acceptable and different clogging susceptibility. The clogging was partial, non-uniform and was caused by biofilm with dissolved solids. Some drippers with overflow rates were noted. The chlorination decreased clogging overtime and reduced the complete clogging. The dripper model B (pressure compensated, flat and inserted in the line, with rectangular elastic membrane over a 30 mm passageway, 0.8 mm narrowest aperture, 1.61 L h-1 under 98 kPa) with chlorination was identified as having the best performance, with the highest number of emitters with a flow rate within five percent of the flow rate when new, and the dripper model M with chlorination was the worst performance with the lowest percent. The filtrage, chlorine and air treatments did not have a statistically significant affect in the DC or CVq. Distribution uniformities higher than 60 %, CVq higher than 20 % and DC higher then 5 % were found. Finally, according to the purposed, It was selected the dripper model B with chlorination as the best combination to mitigate the clogging (AU)