Design of Tank Water Level Control System for Automatic Sprinkler Irrigation

Design of tank water level control system for automatic sprinkler irrigation was carried out to monitor the water level in the tank and to control the pumping process. The system was designed such that when the water in the tank is below the minimum, the pump will automatically activate and refill the tank and also sprinkle the water within the giving interval of time. The Water Level Control System using non-contact Sensor was designed and constructed around a microcontroller (ATmega16A) utilizing non-contact water level sensor called ultrasonic sensor (HC-SR04). The performance of the constructed system was evaluated. The result showed that mean experimented volume of water level in the tank and actual volume of water level in the tank were 8.0 and 8.11 liters, which had a correlation coefficient value of 0.90. The automatic sprinkler reveals that the initial delay from the system was 90 seconds before the sprinkler activates and sprinkle water for 10 seconds. This indicates that there was a higher time delay at the initial time while the sprinkler continues to activate and sprinkle the water for every 10 seconds interval with system delayed at 25 seconds interval, respectively. The efficiency of the system designed was 98.4% which showed that the automatic sprinkler irrigation system could be used by farmers to monitor the water level in the tank and control the pumping process to enhance efficient use of irrigation water to increase crop yield