Sustainable Energy and Environmental Management in a Solar Powered Adaptive Fuzzy Control Model for Ground Water Conservation in Rural India

Abstract

In the present paper, a novel scheme of water level management of a storage tank, adaptive to varying water consumption by an end user, has been designed. This system proposes the intelligent control of water supply from storage tank  fed from reservoir and supplemented through ground water in rural  areas. The control action  has been simulated and validated, for its satisfactory performance, by fuzzy control logic. The proposed  control system optimizes water consumption, leading to improvement in the ground-water life cycle and increasing the life of pumps and bore wells. Moreover, it reduces wastage of water, maintains the water table which is depleting day by day due to ecological unbalance leading to water crisis, more demand  and  its consumption.  It avoids damaging conditions for pump arises due to  muddy ground water, without any inconvenience to the user. In the proposed system, keeping in view the poor grid power availability in rural  areas, a solar-power PWM inverter supply has been used with highly efficient submersible pump with more than 50% saving in electricity. The reservoir tank regularly supplies water daily in varying time schedule to the storage tank fulfill the demand of  water to end users. In the absence of the water in reservoir, or when the supply from the reservoir is insufficient to meet the demand, the  submersible pump, operating on PV stored energy, acts as a supplementary source of water supply. It pumps water to the storage tank in accordance to the demand/consumption of water. This has been achieved with a fuzzy controller, which senses the varying level of water in the storage tank and the end user requirement, and fills up the storage tank from the reservoir tank and/or the submersible pump accordingly.