Improving border irrigation performance with predesigned varied-discharge

Insufficient water resources restrict wheat production in the North China Plain, so it is urgent and essential to improve the border irrigation performance and water use efficiency. This study developed a predesigned varied-discharge irrigation scheme in the closed-ended border. Field treatments, including continuous-discharge (CD), increased-discharge (ID) and decreased-discharge (DD) border irrigation tests, were conducted to evaluate the irrigation performance of the proposed varied-discharge scheme. The DD border irrigation treatment had great application efficiency (AE), distribution uniformity (DU) and requirement efficiency (RE), and its comprehensive evaluation indicator (Y) was also significantly higher than other treatments. DD treatment achieved the average AE, DU, RE and Y values of 91.4%, 95.5%, 99.5% and 95.4%, respectively. Furthermore, the hydraulic simulation model WinSRFR was used to optimize the scheme of predesigned varied-discharge border irrigation, and sensitivity analyses of infiltration parameters, roughness coefficient, slope and inflow rate were carried out. The results indicate that the predesigned varied-discharge border irrigation scheme can improve the irrigation performance, and the DD border irrigation scheme has more satisfactory robustness than that of the ID border irrigation scheme.