Development of Inductive Sensor for Control Gate Opening of an Agricultural Irrigation System

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] The monitoring of water level in the agriculture irrigation channels is essential to control the opening gates of these channels. In this way, WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) have high relevance to obtain this kind of data. In this paper, we propose a sensor to measure the depth changes in irrigation channels to control the gates opening. It is connected to an Adafruit Feather HUZZAH based on ESP8266, which allows us to build a mobile edge computing system. The developed sensor is based on two coils. Sinus-wave powers the first one, and the second is induced. The coils are winding over a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) that has high resistance for corrosion and low price. Besides, we use copper wire as a conductive metal. We test two different configurations of coils. P1 has five spires for the powered coil (PC) and ten spires for the induced coil (IC). On the other hand, P2 has 40 spires for the PC and 80 spires for the IC. The two prototypes were coiled in one layer. Then, both sensors are tested using a glass bottle where the water column increased with the target to obtain the information of the depth. In both prototypes, the difference of voltage between the maximum and minimum studied depths is more or less the same, 4.46V for P1 and 4.44V for P2. Nevertheless, during the stabilization test, the P1 showed better adaptation for the turbulences than the P2. The P1 shows an oscillation of 0.48V, where the P2 has a maximum fluctuation of 3.2V.This work has been partially supported by European Union through the ERANETMED (Euromediterranean Cooperation through ERANET joint activities and beyond) project ERANETMED3-227 SMARTWATIR by the Conselleria de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte with the Subvenciones para la contratacion de personal investigador en fase postdoctoral, grant number APOSTD/2019/04, and through the "Ayudas para contratacion predoctoral de Formacion del Profesorado Universitario FPU (Convocatoria 2016)". Grant number FPU16/05540.Basterrechea-Chertudi, DA.; Rocher-Morant, J.; Parra-Boronat, L.; Lloret, J. (2020). Development of Inductive Sensor for Control Gate Opening of an Agricultural Irrigation System. IEEE. 250-255. https://doi.org/10.1109/FMEC49853.2020.9144810S25025