Global agricultural production is heavily sustained by irrigation, but irrigation system efficiencies are often surprisingly low. However, our knowledge of irrigation efficiencies is mostly confined to rough indicative estimates for countries or regions that do not account for spatiotemporal heterogeneity due to climate and other biophysical dependencies. To allow for refined estimates of globa...

-Water plays an important role in everyday’s life. Agriculture is a backbone of our country and it uses 85% of available fresh water for irrigation. Irrigation is the method of supplying the water to the plants artificially. In India, Farmers follow different irrigation systems to cultivate the crops. The different types of irrigation methods include sprinkler irrigation, drip irrigation, surfa...

Since the 1970's, a large number of individual field studies of diverse irrigation systems have been completed in Nepal. Some of these studies were undertaken by masters or doctoral students and are based on extensive periods of time in the field. Others were written on the basis of shorter periods in the field: rapid rural appraisals, brief reports, and field-site visits by expatriate advisors...

An emerging strategy for creating self-healing materials relies on embedded vascular networks of microchannels to transport reactive fluids to regions of damage. Here we investigate the use of active pumping for the pressurized delivery of a two-part healing system, allowing a small vascular system to deliver large volumes of healing agent. Different pumping strategies are explored to improve t...

The idea of irrigation is not new, irrigation stems as far back as the Egyptians and probably further in unrecorded history. Even the idea of automated irrigation is not new, mankind has figured out how to irrigate large areas of foliage through the use of automated and drop irrigation systems. Efficient, automated irrigation systems, which can irrigate plants to a desired level and supply thos...

Despite concern over poorly maintained irrigation systems and insufficient investment in operations and maintenance (O&M) for irrigation systems in most developing couqtries, there is little agreement about how much money is required. A review of 18 Asian Development Bank (ADB) appraisal reports for irrigation projects in Asia, covering the period 1969-78, revealed O&M estimates ranging from US...

Automatic irrigation scheduling has been demonstrated using wired sensors and sensor network systems with subsurface drip and moving irrigation systems. However, there are limited studies that report on crop yield and water use efficiency resulting from the use of wireless networks to automatically schedule and control irrigations. In this 2011 study, a multinode wireless sensor network (WSN) s...