Simulation of emitter discharge along drip laterals under drip fertigation system using artificial neural network

Simulation of emitter discharge under a drip fertigation system is important for capturing the variation in water and nutrient distribution to crops. This is important for an effective design and irrigation management for agricultural crops. Moreover, the field discharge measurements are laborious and time-consuming, hence the need for the development of a representative model. The application of artificial neural network to simulate drip emitter along drip laterals is new in the field of flow measurement under drip irrigation. The purpose of this study is to predict the emitter discharge along drip laterals using artificial neural network (ANN) and evaluate the performance of the model. The input parameters fed into the ANN include; pipe length away from the fertigation source, elevation heads and distance of emitter point along the laterals. The field measured discharge was considered as the output. Evaluation parameters considered for the designed drip fertigation system indicated high efficiency, in the range between 81 and 98%. Interaction effects were observed between the pipe length and elevation head on the uniformity coefficient (CU) and emitter discharge. When all data were simulated, the ANN model simulated the emitter discharge accurately and precisely along the drip laterals, with R2 value ranging between 0.81 and 0.89, while the normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) was mostly below 20%, thus indicating a good prediction. The mean absolute error ranged between 0.034 and 0.048. Therefore, the ANN model was efficient for capturing the variation in emitter discharge well under the drip fertigation system.