• Ayesha Saleem Mongat

• Muhammad Arshad

• Allah Bakhsh

• Aamir Shakoor

• Lubna Anjum

• Umm-e-Kalsoom

• Abdul Hameed

• Farkhanda Shamim

Abstract

For Agricultural development and strong economy of the country, three important factors Land, Energy and Water play an important role. It is necessary to replace the traditional sources of energy with solar power and conventional methods of irrigation with High Efficiency Irrigation Systems (HEIS) to achieve the challenges of agriculture in future. A study was conducted with the objective to install and evaluate the solar operated drip irrigation system in arid zone of Punjab, Pakistan. The performance, efficiency and distribution uniformity of the system was evaluated. An economic analysis was also made to compare the solar operated with the diesel engine operated drip irrigation system. The range of average discharge values of drip was between 0.0083-0.00856m3 /hr (8.3-8.56lph) at different pressures. For 0.0083m3 /hr discharge, the emission uniformity was between 85-90%, application uniformity was 98-99% and distribution uniformity was 99% at different pressures (kPa). It was found that solar power unit was more efficient, energy saving and economical. The operational cost of the unit was also very low as compared to diesel system while the initial installation cost of solar operational system was high.

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