Presented at the Role of irrigation and drainage in a sustainable future: USCID fourth international conference on irrigation and drainage on October 3-6, 2007 in Sacramento, California.Includes bibliographical references.Centre pivot irrigation systems are known for their irrigation distribution performance potential. Unfortunately the performance analysis of centre pivot irrigation systems is often restricted to the uniformity of distribution. Depending on the characteristics of the applied rainfall, a system designed for high uniformity does not guarantee a high application efficiency once the system is in operation. A method is proposed in the present paper to analyse the average rainfall depth of application and kinetic energy delivered to the soil by individual droplets all over the machine. The method requires water distribution profiles, the distribution of droplet size and velocity along the radius of coverage for any nozzle, and pressure and height of the emitter installed on the machine. Considering the number of nozzles and the range of pressure applied, there is the need for a method calculating: the emitter maximum radius of coverage, then the rainfall distribution profile, then the droplet distribution and finally the associated kinetic energy delivery. These parameters are calculated on a new model of classical design sprayers proposed by IWT Company. These results are being integrated on a centre pivot nozzle chart design software presented in the poster session
