Design and Construction of Full Automatically Micro-lysimeter with Data Recorder and Remote Notification System

The rate of evapotranspiration in the plants is the basis of irrigation planning for water consumption in the agricultural sector. The most accurate method to assess the water requirement in plants is the water balance assessment in weighing lysimeters. The use of conventional weighing lysimeters has different problems such as require to continuous expert presence at the installation site of lysimeter. Therefore, the aim of this study is to design and manufacture of fully automatic portable weighting micro-lysimeter with high accuracy and low cost that in specific time periods (without time limit from a few minutes to a few days) without the need for the presence of an expert, able to measure the required factors in relation to the water balance in the micro-lysimeter, able to automatically add the required water shortage of the plant to the system, able to send the report of measures to the user, able to save the data on the memory card automatically and provide accurate measurement of plant water requirement and automatic irrigation based on the predetermined pattern. In this system, the calculation and sending of the required irrigation information are done by the microcontroller based on the predetermined algorithm. The results of the correlation between the collected data series from the designed Micro-lysimeter and the measured data by the expert person within 10 days (including 6-hour, 12-hour and 24-hour time periods) indicated that the correlations coefficients in all three periods were not different with the perfect reliable line at 99% significant level.