Conference Program > IRSTEA Experimental Platform technical tour (14/10/2015)

General Information

Place: Montpellier Lavalette

Date and time slot: Wednesday, 14 of October, 2015, 09h-12h30

Target Audience: All the participants, particularly the people interested by research activities

Accessibility: Free, subject to availability (for logistic reasons and in order to guarantee your place, we recommend you to book your visit on-line)

Supervisor: Patrick Rosique

Programme

PReSTI is the new plateform cerated by Irstea on the Lavalette site located in the vicinity of Montpellier.  This platform is constituted of anexperimental station that was established in 1989 and a lab that was recently transferred from the center of Aix-en-Provence.

The station has 5ha equipped for experimentation in irrigation. Automatic overpressure feeds the parcels with the water from the BRL network (Bas Rhône Languedoc, see the technical visit for 16/10/2015) to implement different irrigation systems such as drip irrigation, surface irrigation and sprinkler irrigation. The infrastructure is completed with measuring equipment for the water supply, the soil hydrodynamic, and the hydric and physiological condition of the crop.

The field experimental work is also used to develop operational models of crops and of irrigation piloting as well as hydric transfers at the plot scale.

The lab is equipped to conduct both tests for industry, R&D experiment and pure research on the performance of irrigation distribution systems, and the drivers of such performance changing over time, under climate influence or water quality.  The main research focus could be summarized as follows:

-      in sprinkler irrigation the consequences of dispersion mechanism on the sensitivity of sprinklers to wind, its consequences on uniformity of distribution, evaporation and drift.  In the case of drift the last investigations concerned the potential dispersion of aerosols out of the wetted area when applying treated waste waters in a reuse perspective

-      in drip irrigation the consequences of water quality (particles, nutrient) on drippers life duration.  The work on the observation and simulation of flows in transparent drippers where particles may sediment, biofilm may develop and scaling may take place.

High level equipment will be presented for droplet size and path in sprinkler irrigation or flow analysis inside transparent drippers flowpath (IR rain gauge, PIV and PTV facility)

The aim of this infrastructure is to be support for the research lead within the Axe 3 of the UMR G-Eau “Practices and use of water” but also to work in partnership with industrial irrigation and agricultural organizations.

Download the brochure of the visit

Pictures