Design of a passive irrigation controller for efficient water use in low-income countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Efficient irrigation water usage is vital for low-income countries to keep up with projected population and income growth. Current weather- and soil-moisture-based smart irrigation controllers are not easily transferable to the economic and technological context of low-income countries and small remote farms. This paper presents the design of a passive automated irrigation controller that uses standard PVC fittings locally available to our community partner in Nicaragua. The actuation of the valve in the controller is driven by the soil water tension (SWT) from unsaturated soil. The key components of the controller are a ceramic tip connected to a tube of water, a rubber membrane, and a piston that acts like a stopper for the irrigation. The piston length is designed with an initial deflection in the membrane, causing it to push back against the inlet to shut off irrigation. A model of the system composed of the Green-Ampt equation for soil-water dynamics, empirical data for the relationship between soil moisture and controller pressure, and finite element model of the membrane is used to design a controller. The initial system consists of a 2" diameter rubber membrane and a 1" diameter piston. The initial deflection is 1.6cm to create enough force to stop the irrigation until the SWT reaches -35kPa. The controller costs approximately $CDN130 with PVC parts purchased in Canada with retail prices. The cost is expected to drop when discounts from retail prices are actualized. The design has the potential to greatly reduce water usage in drip irrigation systems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".