• Solar powered Automated Water Pumping System for Eco-friendly Irrigation

    This is a research paper which I have worked on with a group of four students under the guidance of Dr. Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, ECE Dept., Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. This paper deals with one of the serious problems India is facing today which is the incapability of using the resources it has got. As part of this research, we have visited one village named Siruvani in Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu state, Southern India. People here depend on agro-based products mainly and their other incomes are from agriculture and tourism as Siruvani is famous for its waterfalls. 


    Though they have water resources all over them and ample amount of groundwater, they are not able to use them at the fullest. Their prime problem is poverty. Government has taken measures to install four motor pumps in the agricultural field to fetch groundwater. But these motors have gone bad six years ago because the people here were not in a position to pay the electricity bill for the electricity being used for these motors. As of now, there is only one farmer who is using diesel pump to irrigate his land. This eats up most of his profit and is very harmful for the environment.
    So, we have come with a proposal to use solar energy to be a solution to tackle this problem. Our system works on solar energy and with the help of sensors, we will be able to sense the moisture content of the soil and the system would water the field even without intervention of any external force. In this way, we have automated it. We look forward to implement this and make this help a lot of villages in the world as this is a problem which concerns the whole world.
    I would like to present the abstract of our research paper which was presented in the International Conference on Environmental Pollution, Restoration and Management (ICEPORM 2017), Quy Nhon, Vietnam.
     https://www.iceporm.com/


    Abstract:
    Many villages in India use fossil fuel based water pumping system for irrigation due to a shortage of electricity. Fossil fuel causes great damage to the environment as they release harmful greenhouse gases. Conventional generation of electricity by thermal and nuclear power plants also harm the environment. In this research work, we propose a solar energy based automated water pumping system which can be used in many villages as an alternative to the fossil fuel based water pumping systems. As the system is automated, the water pumps are switched on only when the moisture content of the soil is below a critical level which is determined by the moisture sensors planted in the fields. An intelligent micro controller based circuit board is the heart of the system. As part of this research work, we conducted a case study in a village called Siruvani near Coimbatore district in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, India. Agriculture is the lifeline for most of the forty-four families that live in this village. Currently, they use diesel based water pumping system which is not only expensive but also harms the environment. The villagers’ profit is greatly reduced as they spend a lot of money in buying diesel for running the water pump system. The study conducted by us shows that the proposed solar based automated water pumping system if implemented would be a boon to these villagers in terms of cost and profit. In addition, this can save a lot of water and is environment-friendly. In this paper we would discuss the design and implementation of the automated solar water pumping system along with the case study carried in Siruvani village.
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