A smart control valve for improved irrigation management

Climate change and population growth (along with an increasing demand for resources), could pose significant challenges to agricultural water management. The higher water demand can significantly impact the operation of irrigation networks, increasing the occurrence of deficit conditions, with severe consequences for the quality of the service. Modernization processes are therefore occurring in the irrigation sector, both related to infrastructure operation and to network management. Such modernization, aimed at the energetic and hydraulic optimization of the network, typically requires the development of new technologies able to respond to new operating requirements: connectivity, real-time actions, reliability. The present study aims at demonstrating the potential associated to the use of the GreenValve, a patent by the Politecnico di Milano, in on-demand pressurized irrigation networks. Basically, the GreenValve is able to recover the energy needed for operation and to create a stand-alone real-time control and monitoring station. It is remotely controlled and allows the introduction of management logic based on the real-time data acquired by the device, thus supporting a new concept of ‘smart’ network management. The EPANET-MATLAB-Toolkit has been used, with specific reference to a real case study in Southern Italy, to develop a model capable to: i) describe the operating conditions throughout an irrigation season; ii) characterize network performances and identify potential failure conditions; iii) suggest criteria to improve network operation exploiting the potentialities of the GreenValve.