A mobile application to calculate optimum drip irrigation laterals

• In-situ and accurate preliminary studies for new drip irrigation installations.
• Assess the possibility of increasing the number of emitters in an existing installation.
• The graphical results permit to calculate the critical points of the irrigation lateral.

The parameters to be taken into account when installing a drip irrigation system include the diameters of piping to be used in the irrigation installation. Certain applications developed for PC permit an approximate calculation of these diameters outside the installation environment, which makes on-site optimization of the system difficult. This paper presents a software application developed for Android mobile devices by which the user can immediately evaluate the responsiveness of all of the available optimum commercial diameters to operational changes, such as changing water demands (e.g., cultivation, water needs, and spacing), types of emitters used in the installation, or lateral feeding (from an extreme or from an intermediate point). The input data mainly required by the application are: emitter flow rates, the number of emitters, the space between emitters, the average pressure in the lateral, and the pressure tolerance. As a result, the application indicates if each irrigation lateral is valid or not for the situation provided by the user, and displays some graphics of the pressures in the lateral that indicate the pressures at the system's extremities, which permits identification of the critical points of the irrigation lateral.