Intelligent Control System for Monitoring the Maintenance of the Center Pivot Irrigation System

Abstract

The national Egypt strategy for sustainable agricultural development (SADS-2030),focuses on increasing agricultural area by approximately 1.5 million feddan to address the food gap. The central pivot irrigation system is one of the most effective ways to achieve this goal. Maintaining a center pivot device is hard. Moreover, repairing the damage that happens after the malfunction of the device will be timeconsuming and costly. So, the main goal of this study was to monitor, detect early error and warn the operator before starting any irrigation process, which prevents a malfunction or crash of the center pivot. The developed monitoring systems use NTC thermistors and an oil level sensor to monitor oil temperature and leaks in the gear box and motor. Tire pressure monitoring sensor (TPMS) was used to monitor towers' tires pressure. These sensors were installed in a unit known as "Tower/central node board" which consists of two ESP32 microcontrollers installed inside the main control panel. The main control panel of the device collects all the vital readings from all towers and communicates them with the cloud server using the internet, which allows the remote control of the device. Field tests were performed by using a "Valley" center Pivot System at the Egyptian Ismailia governorate's conditions, for detecting the sensitivity and accuracy of the system. Data was collected from two towers of the center pivot system and analyzed in a simple digital model that was used to process and decide on possible maintenance instructions.