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The uses of clay pipes in irrigation water management are becoming popular, especially in arid and semi-arid soils. The study examined clay and zeolite materials for irrigation pipes, and this paper reported characteristic properties of these materials. Hydrometer, pychnometer and core sampler methods were for soil physical properties determination. Consistency tests using (Atterberg method) and analytical techniques (Scanning Electron Microscopy, SEM and Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy, EDS) for samples analyses. The results indicate the soil to contain 11 % sand, 34 % silt and 55 % clay fractions and texturally classified as clay with a particle density of 1.58 g/cm3 and bulk density 2.43 g/cm3 respectively. Addition of zeolite at 3:1 clay/zeolite mix ratio shows liquid limit (LL) and plastic (PL) values to decreases from 50.7% to 43.7% and 27.6% to 27.3% while plasticity index, (PI) change from 23.2 to 16.7 respectively. The shrinkage rate decreases from 11.67% for raw clay to 8.92 % for the treated sample. The EDS analysis shows both clay and zeolite samples to contain carbon, silica (SiO2) and alumina (Al2O3) as the major constituents with ferric oxide (Fe2O3), potassium oxide (K2O) and cobalt (Co) as the minor constituents. The major constituents contribute 89.26 and 94.4% while minor contribute 10.74 and 5.59 % in clay and zeolite samples. Modifying clay improved its workability, reduces cracking potential and absorption capacity and performance of porous clay pipes.

Unlike other micro-irrigation facilities like a drip, trickle, and sprinklers that emits water at regularly spaced intervals with predefined discharges, porous rubber pipes (soaker hose) has openings of variable sizes that become unevenly spaced with uneven distribution. The latter makes discharge to be variant along its lateral. Shorter sections are used under laboratory column experiments of soil wetting pattern studies and for this reason, laboratory experiments were conducted to evaluate the extent of emission rates variability on short sections of commercial Irrigation Soaker Hose, 16 mm diameter. Three sections of 10 cm length pipes were randomly selected from 15 no's cuts from different parts of the twenty meters length pipe bundle and used to investigate the extent of variability on emission rates characteristics under six different operating pressures. The result was achieved by collecting and measuring water emitted through the pipe sections at pre-determined pressures. The various discharges, coefficient of variation, and pressure-discharge curves of the section of the pipe then determined from the data. The result shows somewhat similar trends on the increase for water collected with an increase in pressures; however, when statistically compared, the discharges among the pipe sections vary. The values of Coefficient of Variation (CV) are less than 10 % as the values CV range from 0.92 % to 5.82 %, which is within a good category, according to ASAE Standard EP405.1 of 0-10%. The findings indicate that, despite variations among the investigated sections, it can use any part as a representative unit in the soil column experiments with reasonable accuracy.

A water reservoir's operation should follow a rational policy to ensure adequate water provision for different purposes without adverse effects. However, it is not well-studied how to identify operational policies currently being implemented. This study establishes a new approach to identifying nominal release policies as implemented in a multi-purpose water reservoir. We chose Bukit Merah Reservoir (BMR), located in Perak State, Malaysia, as a study site to examine its release policies for meeting irrigation, municipal, and industrial water demands and for mitigating floods and environmental hazards. The operator of BMR releases the reservoir's water into two primary irrigation canals, the Main Canal and the Selinsing Canal. Generalized additive models (GAMs) are applied to time series data observed at BMR to identify the annual dynamics of its water management. Operational policies for the release discharges into the two primary irrigation canals are assumed to be based on information on the time-of-year and the reservoir water level. First, a backfitting algorithm identifies each contributing function of the GAMs representing the release policies. Then, spurious oscillations in the functions are removed by total variation (TV) regularization (TVR) to obtain nominal release policies, which are quite reasonable in the sense of conventional reservoir management practice. Finally, the identified nominal release policies are utilized to examine shifts in the operation of BMR during the period from 2000 through 2011. The decomposition of release policies illustrates the two aspects of the irrigation demand's annual patterns and the hydraulic structures' functions. The spurious oscillations removed by TVR are considered to represent indecision by the reservoir operator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]