An Empirical, Deterministic Design Theory for Compact Drip Emitter Labyrinths
Name
v03bt03a031-detc2023-116552.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
5.41 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
68248bb0485f22f2f0154fc4351b2933
Author(s)
Ghodgaonkar, Aditya
Welsh, Emily
Judge, Benjamin
Bono, Michael
Winter, Amos G
Date Issued
August 20, 2023
Journal
Volume 3B: 49th Design Automation Conference (DAC)
Publisher
American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Citation
Ghodgaonkar, Aditya, Welsh, Emily, Judge, Benjamin, Bono, Michael and Winter, Amos G. 2023. "An Empirical, Deterministic Design Theory for Compact Drip Emitter Labyrinths." Volume 3B: 49th Design Automation Conference (DAC).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Growing food demand, climate change, and constrained natural resources create the need for large-scale, sustainable agricultural intensification. Despite drip irrigation’s ability to be more water efficient than traditional irrigation technologies, its adoption and retention is limited to due to its high hydraulic equipment costs, particularly in low/middle-income countries. As a commodity product, drip emitters contribute directly to raw material costs and additionally dictate tube thickness and related material consumption. This work introduces a new empirical, deterministic design theory for creating compact, low-cost labyrinths, which are otherwise a volume-intensive component of drip irrigation emitters. To simplify design analysis a review of current commercial art, manufacturing process constraints and symmetry-based geometric relationships was conducted, resulting in the labyrinth’s tooth tip gap being selected as a key design variable. The tip gap is correlated with the hydraulic performance of a test labyrinth geometry via a Design of Experiments approach. The experiments shed light on two distinct fluid dynamic regimes in the labyrinth based on the tip gap size and provide an empirical expression between the two. This work demonstrates that simultaneous consideration of symmetry, manufacturing process and design goals enables rapid synthesis of labyrinths that are 43.77% shorter than comparable commercial designs.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1115/detc2023-116552
