Desenvolvimento de uma estação meteorológica de baixo custo e monitoramento em tempo real para manejo automatizado da irrigação

Abstract

Irrigation is a practice that increases productivity and enables the expansion of agricultural frontiers. This practice should be well conducted aiming at the efficient use of water by plants, which requires specialized labor, consequently it increases the operation costs. Based on that, this work is aimed to implement an automated irrigation system, starting from the water demand to the system operation. Taking into account that the daily water demand is determined by the crop evapotranspiration, a low cost meteorological station was developed for daily data acquisition, which allowed to estimate the reference evapotranspiration (ET0) by the PenmanMonteith-FAO model. To determine the daily evapotranspiration of the crop (ETc), preliminary tests were performed, taking into account the crop coefficient, which multiplied by ET0 provided the ETc with adjustment for localized irrigation. Given the amount of water required by the plant, combined with the physical and hydrological properties of the soil and hydraulics of the irrigation system, it was possible to determine the frequency and time required for the system to remain connected to meet the water needs of the culture without stress due to the lack or excess of water. All management/monitoring has been implemented in way that the user can access it remotely through a developed application with internet access. This allowed real-time data transmission, such as weather station data and system logs informing the progress of irrigation, which eliminates the presence of the user at the planting site. This allows the supervision of many areas simultaneously with low cost.