Desenvolvimento de um sistema de controle automático para simulador de chuvas

Abstract

In the 1930‟s, in the United States, Borst and Woodburn developed a rain simulator to conduct studies on the behavior of water runoff. Over time a lot of rain simulators were developed to control and reproduce the characteristics of natural rain. From the 1990‟s, electronic technology started to act more effectively in agricultural machinery and equipment, enabling for better control and process automation. In this scenario, the objective of this dissertation is to present a conception of an automated technical system to control the rain process. The proposed system is able to measure pressure, temperature, water flow in the system and record the data. The system has a microcontroller mounted on the CUSCOPIC kit. Also, the software programming was done in C language. The system was submitted to three experiments: the uniformity of rain distribution with one nozzle, the uniformity of rain distribution with two nozzles and the measurement of kinetic energy at the nozzle. The result of the experiments made it possible to verify that the nozzle, recommended by the manufacturer, was accurate for the number of drops at the same range of the diameter. However, the kinetic energy in both scenarios corresponded to 13.09% and 2.3% of natural rain so, it was not recommended for their use. The use of the concept contributed to the generation of simulated rain with more stability of the pressure and flow of water in the system. Reports generated by the prototype enable recording and tracing the parameters used in each experiment.