Title: Soil moisture sensors for sustainable irrigation: comparison and calibration

Authors: Vaibhav Bhatnagar; Ramesh Chandra; Jagdish Prasad

Addresses: Amity Institute of Information Technology, Amity University Rajasthan, Jaipur, India ' Amity Institute of Information Technology, Amity University Rajasthan, Jaipur, India ' Amity School of Applied Sciences, Amity University Rajasthan, Jaipur, India

Abstract: Soil moisture is a vital component for plant growth. There are many electro-chemical low-cost sensors that sense soil moisture with immediate effect rather than other methods such as gravimetric method and others that are expensive as well as consume lot of time. Some of these electro-chemical sensors work on resistivity whereas some sensors work on capacitance. This paper compares the efficiency of resistivity-based sensors with capacitance-based soil moisture sensors so that farmers and experts can use the better one for designing IoT-based irrigation monitoring and controller system. This comparison is performed with 21 samples having different levels of soil water content. The coefficient of variation is calculated to compare the efficiency of both the sensors. After the comparison, calibration has also been performed that depicts the soil moisture content to LCD display and alert the farmer by a buzzer.

Keywords: soil moisture sensor; irrigation; calibration; Yl-69; SEN: 0193.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSAMI.2019.101375

International Journal of Sustainable Agricultural Management and Informatics, 2019 Vol.5 No.1, pp.25 - 36

Received: 02 Nov 2018
Accepted: 01 Feb 2019

Published online: 05 Aug 2019 *

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