SBIR Phase I: Orchard Transpiration Irrigation

SBIR 第一阶段：果园蒸腾灌溉

• 批准号: 2051966
• 负责人: Joseph Gallegos
• 金额: $ 25.6万
• 依托单位: Drought Diet Products
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-05-01 至 2022-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2051966&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Orchard; Transpiration; Irrigation

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to improve the water usage in agricultural operations. With growing water scarcity from the lack of natural rainfall and depleted groundwater tables, the need to maintain agricultural wells and agricultural production is dramatic. The proposed subsurface irrigation technology will reduce irrigated water by 50% over drip irrigation. This could enable significant reduction in water use and allow the groundwater tables to recover and perform as water reservoirs during drought years. It potentially can raise farm yields, improve weed control for organic farmers, and promote better uptake of fertilizers - thereby minimizing the pollution of underground aquifers. The proposed technology also can lead to energy cost reductions and increased flexibility in scheduling power usage. At a systems level, it offers a new paradigm for a resilient and sustainable irrigation. The proposed research is focused on the development of an easy-to-use moisture plume simulation calculator that enables farmers to self-analyze how their soil type will react when installing a virtual water table irrigation system. The latter is designed to eliminate water lost by surface evaporation and deep percolation. The research approach taken is an interdisciplinary collaboration to mathematically model the physics of how liquid transports from the subsurface feed pipes through the porous soil to the roots of the plants in an efficient manner with adequate accuracy. The predictions will be compared with more comprehensive industry-standard hydrological model predictions and also with the experimentally collected moisture data from the field. The technical risks lie in determining whether the basic soil properties collected by the non-scientist farmers would be adequate as inputs to generate an accurate prediction of moisture plume profile across many soil types.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）I阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是改善农业运营中的用水量。由于缺乏自然降雨量和枯竭的地下水表，水缺乏稀缺，维持农业井和农业生产的需求是巨大的。拟议的地下灌溉技术将使灌溉水减少50％，而不是滴灌。 这可以大大减少用水量，并使地下水表在干旱年份恢复并作为水库恢复并执行。它可能会提高农场产量，改善有机农民的杂草控制，并促进更好地吸收肥料，从而最大程度地减少地下含水层的污染。拟议的技术还可以导致降低能源成本，并提高调度功率使用的灵活性。在系统层面上，它为弹性和可持续的灌溉提供了新的范式。拟议的研究集中在开发易于使用的水分羽流仿真计算器上，该计算器使农民能够自我分析安装虚拟地下水位灌溉系统时的土壤类型将如何反应。后者旨在消除由于表面蒸发和深度渗透而流失的水。采用的研究方法是一种跨学科的合作，以数学方式对液体如何通过多孔土壤进行从地下饲料管传输到植物的根部的物理学，并具有足够的精度。这些预测将与更全面的行业标准水文模型预测以及实验收集的水分数据进行比较。技术风险在于确定非科学家农民收集的基本土壤特性是否足够，因为投入以产生许多土壤类型中的水分羽状素材的准确预测。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用该基金会的知识分子优点和广泛的影响来评估NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得的。