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Automated irrigation system using solar power

Conference Paper · December 2012

DOI: 10.1109/ICECE.2012.6471527

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2012 7th International Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering
20-22 December, 2012, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Automated Irrigation System Using Solar Power
Jia Uddin1, S.M. Taslim Reza2, Qader Newaz2, Jamal Uddin2, Touhidul Islam2, and Jong-Myon Kim1,*
1
School of Electrical Engineering, University of Ulsan, 93 Daehak-ro, Nam-gu, Ulsan 680-749, South Korea
2
Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, International Islamic University Chittagong
154/A, College Road, Chawk Bazar, Chittagong-4200, Bangladesh
*
jmkim07@ulsan.ac.kr
Abstract— This paper proposes a model of variable rate
automatic microcontroller based irrigation system. Solar power
is used as only the source of power to control the overall system.
Sensors are placed on the paddy field and these sensors
continuously sense the water level and give the message to the
farmer informing the water level. Without visiting the paddy
fields, farmers can get the information about the water level.
Based on the water level, a farmer can control the motor by
sending a message from his cellular phone even from a remote
place. However, if the water level reaches to the danger level;
the motor will automatically start without confirmation of
farmer to ensure the proper water level in the site. At the end of
this paper, a complete hardware implementation of this
proposed automated irrigation system is presented.
Index Terms— Automated Variable Rate Irrigation System,
Solar Power, Sensor, Dual Tone Multi Frequency (DTMF).
I. INTRODUCTION
The continuously increasing demand of the food necessitates
the rapid improvement in food production technology. In
most of the developing countries such as Bangladesh,
national economy mainly depends on the Agriculture. But
these countries do not able to make proper use of agricultural
resources due to the high dependency on rain [1]. Nowadays
different irrigation systems are used to reduce the dependency
of rain and mostly the existing irrigation systems are driven
by electrical power and manually ON/OFF scheduling
controlled [2]. Farmers usually control the electric motors
observing the soil, crop and weather conditions by visiting
the sites [3]. These manually controlled irrigation systems
cannot ensure a proper level of water in the site [4-7]. Due to
the lack of electricity and mismanagement in the manually
controlling systems, sometimes their fields become dry and
sometimes flooded with excess water [8]. These unplanned
and manually controlled irrigation systems also cause a
significant amount of water waste [9].
Automatic irrigation system is usually designed for
ensuring the proper level of water for growing up the plants
all through the season. Even when the farmers are away,
these automatic irrigation systems always ensure the proper
level of water in the sites [10]. In addition, it provides
maximum water usage efficiency by monitoring soil
moistures at optimum level [11].
Several research works have reputed aspects of
development of automated irrigation system [1, 7, 12, 13, 14,
15, 18]. With the development of technology in water saving
irrigation and automation, automatic irrigation is going to be
more popular in the farms. For example, a GSM based
automatic irrigation water control is proposed [15]. A mobile
irrigation system has been developed which improves water
efficiency by saving the water [16]. Artificial Neural
*
Corresponding author.
978-1-4673-1436-7/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE
228
Network (ANN) based intelligent control system is proposed
for effective irrigation scheduling in paddy fields [1, 17].
In the past, most of the proposed irrigation models are
driven by electricity and their corresponding automated
hardware are fixed rate. And these models are highly
expensive as those were made of expensive devices. Thus,
due to higher cost, the general farmers cannot buy it for their
use; usually these models are used in the farms only for
experiment or demonstration funded by government or any
private organization.
On the other hand, the variable rate automated controlling
approach improves the overall irrigation system reducing the
total cost and increases the production of crop yield [17].
Therefore, low price, alternative source of electricity and
variable rate automated operation are the key concerns in the
design of an irrigation system for the common farmers.
In this paper, we propose a solar power controlled
automated irrigation system. Sensors collect the information
about the water level of paddy fields and update the farmer as
well as the microcontroller. The farmer can switch ON and
OFF the motor based on the water level even from distant
places using a cell phone. However, if the water level reaches
to the danger level, then the motor will automatically start to
ensure the proper water level in the paddy field.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
describes the proposed model with a block diagram; circuit
components with detail description are presented in Section
III. Additionally, hardware implementation of the proposed
model is demonstrated in this section. Finally, Section IV
concludes the paper.
II. PROPOSED MODEL
A complete block diagram of proposed automated irrigation
system is illustrated in Fig. 1. The area of paddy field usually
may cover up several hundreds of hectares; to cover the
whole area we need to place different sensors in the paddy
field. The sensors will always sense the water level of the
field and will send a message to the user’s cell phone to
inform the condition of irrigation through the DTMF (Dual
Tone Multi Frequency) signalling. Farmer will control the
motor sending assigned code to the microcontroller.
A Photo Voltaic (PV) cell is the only source of energy to
drive this proposed system. The energy will be stored in the
DC Battery through power supply. The sensors,
microcontroller and cell phone interface are driven by DC
power. However, pump is driven by AC power; inverter is
used to convert DC to AC power, and AC power interface
ensures the proper AC power supply to the pump.
 229

Inverter AC power Interface Pump Cell Phone

Sensor Micro Controller Cell Phone Interface

PV Cell Power Supply Battery

Fig. 1 Block diagram of proposed circuit model

III. DESCRIPTION OF PROPOSED MODEL

A. Circuit detail of Proposed Model
In this section, different circuit components of our proposed
model are illustrated in Fig. 2- Fig. 7. Normally, sensor is a
device that measures a physical quantity and converts it into a
signal which can be read by an observer/ instrument. In this
paper, we propose a model of designing sensor as presented in
Fig. 2. Two metal plates such as A and B are used to form a
sensor; at where 5V DC power is attached with plate A, and
plate B is connected with a microcontroller. Normally plate A
and plate B are isolated from each other and no voltage signal Fig. 3 Control module of the system
passes to the microcontroller. When the water fills the gap, the
metal plates A and B gets connection and voltage signal passes The cell phone interface usually consists of an optocoupler
to the microcontroller. which is connected with the keypad of the cell phone as
depicted in Fig. 5. The microcontroller will seek the decision
+5v from the farmer through a message; whether he wants to start
the pump or not. In our propose model, an individual code is
assigned for each user. If the farmer wants to start the pump,
he will send a message with the assigned code to the
A B microcontroller through the DTMF decoder.
MCU The circuit detail of a balanced-line mode DTMF is
illustrated in Fig. 6. To reject the common-mode noise signals,
a balanced differential amplifier input is used. The circuit also
provides an excellent bridging interface across a properly
Fig. 2 Sensor connections to microcontroller terminated telephone line. Whenever the farmer presses any
According to our design model, if the water level reaches key on his mobile phone keypad, the delayed steering (Std)
to 0cm, the microcontroller will automatically start the pump output of the IC (Integrated Circuit) goes high on receiving
through AC interface according to the command of the pin the tone-pair, and glow the LED15 (connect with pin15 of IC
RA4 as depicted in Fig. 3. The farmer will be confirmed by a via resistor R15) for a duration depending on the value of
message; for example, PUMP STARTED. capacitor and resistor connected with pins 16 and 17. The
AC interface usually consists of a relay which is operated LEDs connected with resistors R11-R14 at pins 11-14,
by the microcontroller and used to control the pump as indicate the output of the IC. The tone pair of DTMF
presented in Fig. 4. The pump will remain switched ON until generated by pressing the telephone button is converted into
the water level reaches to the secured level 10cm. When the binary values internally in the IC.
sensors sense the water level is above 10cm, microcontroller
will make the pump to be switched OFF; as it is receiving the
status of water level from the sensors. At the secure level
(10cm) the microcontroller will not operate. However, if the
water level goes down to mid level (3cm) the sensors will
send a signal to the microcontroller through the pin 12 (RB6)
as depicted in Fig. 3. After receiving the signal the
microcontroller will send a message (for example, WATER
LEVEL LOW) to the user’s cell phone through the cell phone
interface.
Fig. 4 AC Interface

Fig. 5 Cell phone interface
Fig. 6 Dual Tone Multi Frequency Decoder
The binary values are indicated by glowing LEDs at the
output pins of the IC. For example, if the farmer dials a
number 5, LED12 and LED14 will glow as corresponding
binary value is 0101. Similarly, for any other number, the
corresponding LEDs will glow. Thus, a non-defective IC
should indicate the proper binary values corresponding to the
decimal numbers pressed on the telephone key-pad. The
microcontroller will start the pump if it gets the correct code.
However, the microcontroller will automatically switch ON
the pump if water level reaches to the danger level even if the
farmer does not send the code.
Fig. 7 Solar energy supply system
A small PV (Photo Voltaic) cell (6V) is connected with a
battery through the charge controller. A solar energy supply
system is demonstrated in Fig. 7, at where the charge
controller will limit the rate of current is added to or drawn
from the battery to prevent the overcharging of battery. The
voltage regulator will always maintain a constant 5V supply to
the module.
B. Hardware implementation of proposed model
In this section, hardware implementation of propose
automated irrigation model is presented in Figs. 8-11. The
hardware implementation of our propose sensor using two
metal plates is presented in Fig. 8. Figure 9 illustrates the
small water pump which we used for our experiment. Figure
10 shows the complete hardware implementation of propose
system which can ensure the proper water level in the paddy
field.
230
Fig. 8 Proposed Sensor with two metal plates
Fig. 9 Irrigation water pump
Fig. 10 A complete implementation of proposed model
C. Flow diagram of proposed model
Figure 11 illustrates a flow diagram of propose automated
irrigation model. Where, T and F stand for True (desired level
of water exist) and False (desired level of water does not
exist), respectively.
At first the microcontroller will check the status of mid
sensor (3cm). If mid sensor senses the water level that means
sufficient level of water exists in the paddy site, the
microcontroller will not initiate any decision. However, if the
water level reaches below the mid sensor it will send a
message seeking decision from the farmer. If the farmer sends
a message with his assigned code, the pump will start and will
run till reaches to the high sensor (10cm). Conversely, if the
farmer does not send a message, then the microcontroller will
wait for the command until the water reaches to the low
sensor (0cm). If the water falls down to low sensor the pump
will automatically start and continue till water level reaches to
high sensor. In this way the loop will be continuously
followed by the microcontroller.
 231

[5] M. Dursun and S. Ozden, “A Prototype of PC Based Remote Control

Start
T
Mid Sensor
F Irrigation System Based on Wireless Network,” 8th IEEE International
Send Message
Get Code
Yes
No
T Irrigation in Bermuda grass,” ASAE Annual International Meeting,
Low Sensor
F Agricultural University, Vol.36, No.6, pp. 753-755, Dec. 2005.
Start Pump
F [14]
High Sensor
T Based-Automatic-Irrigation-Water-Controller.
Stop
Fig. 11 Flow diagram of propose model
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, an automated irrigation model is proposed and
successfully implemented using different circuits as
demonstrated in different figures. We designed and
implemented this model considering low cost, reliability,
alternate source of electric power and automatic control. As
the proposed model is automatically controlled it will help the
farmers to properly irrigate their fields. The model always
ensures the sufficient level of water in the paddy field
avoiding the under-irrigation and over-irrigation. Farmers can
remotely ON/OFF the motor by using cell phone even from
away. The system is secured with password for the restricted
number of users. Solar power provides sufficient amount of
power to drive the system. To overcome the necessity of
electricity and ease the irrigation system for our farmers, the
propose model can be a suitable alternative.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the National Research
Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant Funded by the Korean
Government (MEST) (No. 2012-0004962).

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