Recent Trends in Irrigation Engineering Using Solar Energy: Review

Egypt faces at the present time many major challenges, foremost of which is the limited and scarcity of water resources. Therefore, it is imperative for all workers and specialists in the field of sustainable water management to focus on, adopt and publish how to apply most water-saving technologies suitable for the conditions of the simple Egyptian farmer. Maximizing irrigation water use efficiency is a popular concept used by irrigation project managers. The country has recently paid a great attention to water policy, through the cooperation between the Ministries of Agriculture and Irrigation. The actual implementation has begun in some of governorates, including Ismailia, Suez, Port-Said, the New Valley and Behira as a first stage of replacing the traditional irrigation systems into fully controlled systems. Among the renewable sources of energy especially, in the Arab countries region, solar energy represents a good potential for the sustainable energy applications. Therefore, it is important to establish solar pumping systems for increasing the agricultural reclamation projects. The current case study is done by presenting a theoretical analysis to evaluate the water pumping technique using solar energy under several water demands. The dynamic simulation model output results covered all the performance affected parameters like solar energy input, water demands, and total dynamic head. On the other hand, the economic analysis of the system is also considered.