Influence of sprinkler irrigation droplet diameter, application intensity and specific power on flower damage

Abstract

To determine the main parameters of droplet strike damage and avoid flower injury due to the unsuitable practices during sprinkler irrigation, an indoor experiment of irrigation droplet impact on cyclamen was conducted. The influences of different parameters such as droplet diameter, application intensity, specific power on flower strike damage was analyzed using Image Pro-Plus software to compute strike damage area and define damage level by sense-analysis. The results showed that a damage area of <1% represents a safe irrigation level, 1%–3% slight damage level, 3%–6% moderate damage level, and>6% heavy damage level. Equations of application intensity, specific power with sprinkler irrigation time and flower injury ratio were regressed against parameters which cause impact damages. The results indicated that specific power has a significant correlation with injury, and flower damage area increased as the increasing of the value of specific power for the same irrigation time. Application intensity was also correlated with injury when the droplet diameter was larger than 1 mm. When the duration of sprinkler irrigation was 1, 5 and 10 min, the threshold of impinging damage of application intensity was 25.30, 5.01 and 1.64 mm·h⁻¹ and the specific power was 0.467×10⁻³, 9.340×10⁻³ and 3.110×10⁻³ W·m⁻². These results provide a reference for determining the suitable values of sprinkler properties in operation design.

Keywords

application intensity / damage / floriculture / flowers / specific power / sprinkler irrigation

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Science and Technology Program in Rural Areas during the Twelfth Five-year Plan Period (2015BAD22B01-02).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Yisheng Zhang and Delan Zhu declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2017. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)