Determination of the design working head of emitter

The design working head of emitter is an important technical parameter for drip irrigation system. So far, no theory could explain how to decide the value of the parameter. This paper studied the principle of design working head of emitter and proposed the evaluation factor for evaluating how surface status of irrigation area affects irrigation quality——that is flow deviation created by difference in elevation. The results indicated that adopting traditional value of the design working head of emitter to design drip irrigation system often makes system over-adopt the land configuration and waste a large amount of investment and running cost. There is still a lot of potential to further optimize drip irrigation design through improving the valuing of the design working head of emitter. Further more, the equation of the design working head of emitter was deduced based on the principle that the ability of system to adapt to land configuration matches to the surface status of irrigation area.