Impacts of Soil Compaction in Subsurface Drip Irrigation System

This work focuses othe effect of soil compaction on performance of the Subsurface Drip Irrigation (SDI) system; since the emitters in this system are buried, by operating heavy farm machineries on the field, compaction is bound to occur and secondly finding methods of improving emitter performance, mainly in circumstances where the soil is compacted. Subsurface drip irrigation provides the required amount of water and fertilizer, directly onto the plant root zone with a high efficiency.Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the variation of the emitters' discharge rate and wetting patterns on SDI system performance due to soil compaction. To achieve this objective an experiment consisting of an air tank, water reservoir, digital flow meter, digital penetrologger, pressure gauge, emitters with three discharge rates of 2, 4, and 8 L/hr, three different soil samples loosely packed in lysimeters were carried out.In conclusion, this study has shown that emitter discharge rate and wetting diameter decreases with the increase in soil cone index and encourages deeper lateral depth and higher operating pressure depending on a soil cone index.