Monitoring of drippers during wastewater application through statistical quality control

Abstract

The use of alternative water sources for irrigation such as wastewaters, promotes innumerous benefits, but investigations must be conducted to minimize the negative effects of this technique. Clogging drippers are of the limitations. This study aimed to monitor the clogging of three models of labyrinth-type drippers subjected to irrigation with wastewater from treated domestic sewage, through statistical quality control using Shewhart charts. The drippers tested were as following: Dripper Streamline 16080 model (Netafim®); Taldrip model (Naadanjain®); and Dripper Tiran 16010 model (Netafim®). The system was installed with five lateral lines per model of dripper on a bench at the field in the Brazilian semi-arid region. The system was evaluated every 36 h of operation at eight collection points in each lateral line, totaling thirty-three evaluations at the end of the experiment, which corresponded to a total of 1188 h of operation. Dripper clogging was identified by the statistical control charts with 432, 540 and 360 h for the drippers Streamline 16080 model, Taldrip model and Tiran 16010 model, respectively, indicating the moment to apply a cleaning process. The monitoring through statistical quality control allowed simultaneously identifying the variability of the process and the reduction in flow rates, identifying the moment of clogging of the system and to carry out actions of unclog.

Effect of treated wastewater irrigation on ornamental plants: Case study of Lantana and Hibiscus, Morocco

“…These results confirm those obtained by Bourziza et al (2017) who found that high salinity in irrigation water increases the risk of dripper clogging. Also, Zhou et al (2016), andSzekut et al (2020) found in their research work that suspended solids present in the water accentuated the clogging of drippers.…”