Development and Testing of Intelligent Sensing and Precision Proportioning System of Water and Fertilizer Concentration

Abstract

Water and fertilizer integration technology can effectively improve nutrient utilization efficiency. However, the existing water and fertilizer machines have some shortcomings, such as huge cost, single fertilizer injection, need for cleaning water and so on, which hinder the development of water and fertilizer integration technology. Aiming at the problems of precise and low-cost compounding of compound fertilizer at the local farm, the water and fertilizer integrated intelligent irrigation and fertilization system were taken as the research object. In this research, new concept of an intelligent sensing system was proposed， and accurate proportioning system of water and fertilizer concentration was constructed and implemented. Firstly, a fast on-line method of intelligent sensing model of water and fertilizer was established based on a series of concentration gradient compound fertilizer solutions. The conductivity values of these formulated solutions were tested by contactless conductivity detection electrodes. Subsequently, the data analysis algorithms were discussed and compared to fit regression model. Based on the intelligent sensing model of water and fertilizer , the framework structure of in-situ intelligent sensing and accurate proportioning system of water and fertilizer concentration was designed, and the working principle of the system was also explained. The system proposed includs a first-level water and fertilizer concentration intelligent perception model building subsystem and a second-level water and fertilizer accurate proportioning subsystem. The first-level subsystem was designed as a portable device, which mainly included a precise pump for quantitative dosing, a large-range online conductivity sensor, a plastic bucket and supporting control and model building software. The second-level subsystem was designed as a dynamic and precise fertilizer distribution device. The effectiveness of the system was verified by three types of water intelligent fertilizer application so as to guide the in-situ water and fertilizer concentration ratio. The testing results showed that the second-order polynomial fitting curve under regularization conditions was the best model to express the relationship between the conductivity and the concentration of water and fertilizer, and the correlation coefficients R2 was higher than 0.999. Combined with the proportion of each index of compound fertilizer, the concentration of each index of compound fertilizer that the user cares about can be obtained according to this model. The results of three types of water intelligent fertilizer application showed that the conductivity of natural water had an effect on the water and fertilizer system, and the relative deviation was more than 0.1. The online water and fertilizer perception and ratio system proposed in this research realized the elimination of the interference of the local water conductivity on the accuracy of the ratio of water and fertilizer, and the accurate calculation of compound fertilizer was achieved through model calculation. This system has a simple structure and accurate ratio, low cost， and can be easily combined with the existing water and fertilizer integrated machine or artificial fertilizer system. The system could be widely used in facility agriculture, orchard cultivation and field cash crop cultivation, et al.

Keywords

• water and fertilizer integration
• conductivity
• intelligent sensing
• precision proportioning
• system modeling
• polynomial curve fitting