Journal of Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers ISSN:1738-3692(Print) 2093-7709(Online) 한국농공학회논문집

Drip irrigation system is a low energy cost method which can efficiently save and supply water by dropping water slowly on the crop’s root zone during crop growth. In the drip irrigation system, disk filters take an important role to physically remove impurity (inorganic and suspended organic) particles present in agricultural water which can cause emitter clogging. For the purpose, both top-and-bottom surfaces of the disk are grooved in micron size flowing from outside to inside. However, many congested flow paths in disk filter media incur higher head loss of inflow water resulting in relatively decreasing velocities depending on operation time than sand and mesh filters. Therefore, it is important to optimize the structure of disk filter in micro irrigation system. The head loss of disk filter media takes also charge of more than 60 % of total head loss in whole disk filter. This study is to find the appropriate cross-sectional shape of the disk groove to minimize the head loss by executing the experiment. The experiment used three disk filters that have similar filter body but have a half-elliptic and two kinds of triangular cross sections. The experimental results showed that the disk filter with half-elliptic cross sections of disk grooves have less head loss than the disk filter with regular triangular one.