Abstract:

Irrigation water use is a crucial issue in Agricultural Engineering. Planning, design and management of irrigation districts are key competences of Agricultural Engineers. And consequently several subjects on these topics are scheduled in the syllabus corrresponding to the Degree of Agricultural Engineering, among others, Irrigation Engineering, Hydraulics, Water Resources Management, and Agrometeorology. Practical sessions are of paramount importance for a suitable understanding, because they provide relevant application of theoretical fundamentals previously taught, and valuable learning outcomes. In most cases, students also acknowledge the importance and usefulness of these sessions, because they can get in touch with materials, equipment and technology. Specifically, focussing on the previous subjects, laboratory facilities should be very desirable or even mandatory. Nevertheless, in some cases, this might be temporarily or permanently not possible, mainly due to economic constraints. This work describes different practical sessions that might be scheduled and carried out with limited equipment for the subject Irrigation Engineering, corresponding to the Degree of Agricultural Engineering. In particular, 6 sessions are presented and described on the following issues: emitter recognition, in-field description of the wet bulb, installation hydraulic evaluation, simulation of irrigation scheduling or virtual scheduling, crop water requirement estimation using conventional methods, and crop water requirement estimation using robust methods. These sessions are thought to require very scarce experimental equipment and resources, taking advantage of external public or private irrigation districts and open-source numerical computing tools like Octave, as well as other robust and free applications like the Irrigation Expert Simulator (IES).

Keywords:

Agricultural engineering, irrigation engineering, practical sessions, limited resources.