Professional Documents
Culture Documents
In this project, the main concept exploited in designing of this equipment is the variation of soil resistance or the soil voltage depending upon the variation of the soil moisture. In other words the soil exhibits a variation in its resistance whenever the water content in the soil increase or decreases. As the moisture in the soil increases the soil resistance decreases that also amounts to saying that the soil voltage increases. Thus it would be incorrect to state that the soil voltage is directly proportional to the soil moisture content. Accordingly it follows that the soil voltage is maximum if the water content in the soil is maximum i.e., the soil is totally wet and the soil voltage is minimum (approximately equal to zero) in a dry soil The high dry soil resistance may be owed to the fact that the absence of the water content provides no conducting medium of the current flow. It may be then considered to be similar to an insulator. When the soil is watered until it is fully wet it then begins to conduct current like a metallic conductor. In the intermediate stages i.e., as the soil moisture increases from 0% to 100% the soil voltage increases from minimum to maximum. The circuit basically consists of a step down center tap transformer that reduces the 230V supply from the mains to 12V peak-to-peak voltage. This is then fed to a bridge rectifier that converts this 12V peak-to-peak AC voltage to 12V DC voltage. The output of the bridge rectifier for obvious reasons have very high ripple factor. Thus in order to decrease the ripple the rectifier IC is used. This circuit now provides an output voltage of 12V DC. This is used as the Vcc or the biasing voltage for the next part of the circuit comprising of the DARLINGTON CIRCUIT. In some instances the need arises for an amplifier with high input impedance. To achieve larger input, here the two transistors form a composite pair, the input resistance of the second transistor constituting the emitter for the first. More specifically, the Darlington circuit consists of two cascaded emitter followers with infinite emitter resistance in the first stage.
The figure shows the required soil composition in the tropical countries such as India for the optimum growth of the plants. As it can be seen that water content ins the soil composes nearly 25%.
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
The figure shows the inverting amplifier. This is followed by a voltage follower which is nothing but a simple approach to avoid the loading of the previous stage. The circuit of a voltage follower is very similar to that of the inverting amplifier except that the voltage gain in the voltage follower is unity (1). Thus here though the voltage remains the same the current gets amplified. This is important in order to drive the buzzer. Finally the voltage follower feeds its output to the buzzer. When the soil is wet its resistance being very less offers a very low voltage drop. In ideal conditions this voltage drop may be completely neglected. Thus the emitter of the two transistors in the DARLINGTON circuit get short giving a zero (0) output. Thus the current flowing into the buzzer is very less, thus the buzzer remains OFF. Whereas under practical considerations, due to the impurities present in the water in the soil its a finite but a very
17
18
19
When diodes are used in a circuit, the voltages and currents flowing through them should be such that, the devices remain safe. The diode used in the bridge rectifier circuit in this experiment is IN4001 SPECIFICATIONS: o Forward voltage o Power dissipation o Forward current o Peak inverse voltage TRANSISTORS: Transistor is a two junction three lead component. These leads are emitter, base and collector. A transistor is a semiconductor device in which current flows through semiconductor materials. In a bipolar junction transistor the term bipolar is used as two type of charge carriers, holes and electrons are involved in current flow. When a thin layer of P-type or N-type semiconductor is sandwiched between a pair of opposite types, the result is a transistor. There are two types of transistors o PNP transistor o NPN transistor In a PNP transistor a thin layer of N type semiconductor is placed between two P type semiconductors. In a NPN transistor a thin layer of P type semiconductor is placed between two N type semiconductors. The transistor BC 148 is used in the experiment is NPN type transistors. REGULATORS:
20
This is one of the simplest ways of detecting the soil moisture. This instrument can be made automatic which then becomes a self-sufficient soil moisture controller. In other
21
22
23