Impact of weekly flushing on hydraulic performance of emitters when using treated wastewater

Limitation of water resources in countries that are located in arid and semi-arid areas, urbanization development and population growth and pressure on conventional water resources, besides the difficulties and sanitation costs, caused more attention towards using wastewater in agriculture. Several investigations have shown that among different irrigation methods, drip irrigation has the best compatibility with wastewater applications. However, emitters clogging is the most important disadvantages of wastewater application in drip irrigation. To investigate the effect of weekly flushing on performance of emitters when using treated wastewater, a physical model of drip irrigation system was designed and constructed. Consequently, four prevalent types of emitters including Microflapper, Netafim, Emitting pipe and Antelco were selected and used. The results showed that flushing management treatment cause to increase the discharge rate, distribution uniformity, absolute distribution and Christiansen uniformity coefficient and to reduce the coefficient of variation of all the emitters when treated wastewater was applied. However, this increasing was depended on the type of emitters, such that the largest impact was obtained on Antelco emitter. The result further showed that Netafim and Microflapper dripper, with 8.5 and 27.8 percents, respectively, have the minimum and maximum discharge reductions when treated wastewater was used. Netafim dripper had high performance when flushing management practice was applied and it proven to have better performance than other emitters for long time period.