الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 188 |  |  |
| | | from | 188 | | |
Abstract
Agriculture is the largest consumer sector of fresh water in Egypt, which consumes more than 80% of Egypt’s water resources. The total amount of irrigation water used by agricultural sector mainly depends on the area cultivated, methods of irrigation, efficiencies, crop types, and overall management process. As a part of improving water allocation and management, the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation (MWRI) have initiated a national program to improve the existing irrigation system in the old lands. The project implements series of intervention in irrigation delivery system. Eventually, electric pumps are used to directly supply irrigation water (direct pumping system) instead of using an open stand tank. However, there is no solid conclusion that evaluates the farmers’ practices using the direct pumping system. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the direct pumping system for irrigation improvement project in Kafr El-Dawar area to understand the farmers’ practices in their fields. This evaluation was conducted in summer season 2013 every ten days by using a set of performance indicators proposed by Molden and Gate 1990 [1]. The results of water delivery performance reveal that efficiency, equity, and dependability were evaluated as ”poor” according to the performance standards. Also, some questionnaires were collected from operators and farmers in the selected mesqas during the summer season to clear the advantage and disadvantage of the direct pumping system. where 88% of farmers noticed system suffered from electromechanical problems of the mesqas. These problems affected negatively in the hydraulic behavior of the pumps when these problems were not fixed suitably, and that caused accumulation of problems with the time. 75% of farmers mentioned that there was a big problem about cutting off the electricity. 20% of the farmers mentioned the leakage of the valves. Consequently, different study cases were conducted by a mathematical model (MATLAB) to simulate the selected mesqas. Through the calibrated model, mesqa system is hydraulically investigated. The model results reveal that the total head and the simulated discharge have a reasonable agreement when they compared with the measured data at each valve along mesqa pipeline. Then different suggested scenarios for each mesqa were introduced to improve water delivery performance by using the predicted model and performance indicators. When the riser diameter mostly modified to be 4 inches for all valves, the system not only delivers the right amount of water required to crops without excess flow but also gives a fair share of water among farmers. Therefore, we should apply the best scenario in each mesqa and monitoring the effect of these scenarios on the farmers.