An intelligent irrigation management model for direct injection of solar pumping systems

The photovoltaic pumping systems are useful for irrigation, but must ensure that water is applied to the crop as uniformly and efficiently as possible at all points of the irrigation subunit. To solve this problem, the I-Selector model was developed. It allowed to generate irrigation schedules with the application of quality criteria both for combinations of subunits studied individually (with a standard deviation in the applied water sheet: 2.8 m3·ha−1) and for combinations of several subunits studied working together depending on,among other things, the available photovoltaic energy and the extraction capacity of the well, allowing to compare and analyze the best irrigation strategy to be used and being a flexible model that can be used in any case of study. Thus, the I-Selector model has generated irrigation schedules to establish the optimal sequence of opening combinations of subunits distributed by daily time slots, thus indicating the convenience of its use at each time of day for the best use of water and energy in a high-power solar pumping system located in Albacete, Spain.