Design of a portable photovoltaic solar panel integrated with water pumping system used in agricultural irrigation in remote land conditions and its performance investigation

One of the two important factors that ensure development in developing countries is agriculture and the other is energy. The most important need for agriculture is water resources and irrigation systems. Climate changes adversely affect water resources, which are the world's basic source of life. Water availability and access to water is quite difficult and troublesome for rural areas in most of the countries. The Eastern Anatolia Region, one of the seven regions of Turkey, has very limited access to water due to its mountainous, hilly and rural areas, as well as the lack of a modern electricity network in many cities of the region. On the other hand, Turkey has a rich solar energy potential due to its location in the region of the world called the sun belt. Due to the location of our country, the average annual total sunshine duration is 2640 hours (daily total 7.2 hours) and the average total radiation intensity is 1311 kWh/m2year (daily total 3.6 kWh/m2). In this thesis study, off-grid solar water pumping systems are seen as the best solution source to meet the water needs of farmers in rural areas far from the city in the Palu district of Elazığ province in the Eastern Anatolia region. In addition, irrigation in Palu District is provided in two different ways; along the Murat River, irrigation is mostly provided from this river, while the areas away from the river are only dependent on seasonal rainfall. In this region, rainfall occurs in the autumn and spring seasons. However, there is not a good amount of rainfall in these seasons and drought occurs. For these reasons, in this study, an off-grid solar water pump was designed to meet the water demand in rural areas located far from the Murat River (latitudes 38° 21' and 38° 51' and longitudes 39° 41' and 40° 23'). The designed system can meet the daily water demand of 27 m3 for approximately 1 acre. The water requirement of some agricultural crops grown in the selected region was determined using Cropwat 8.0 software programme. PVsyst software program was used to determine the required solar panel power for the solar DC water pumping system. As a result, it was found that 1,710 W energy using 6 solar panels (285 W each) was sufficient for the daily water need of 27 m3. Using this method, the most suitable portable solar panel system was determined. It was seen that by operating irrigation systems with solar energy, agriculture, and food production can be increased efficiently and is an economically very beneficial method.