There are various factors that affect water distribution uniformity from sprinklers, such as sprinkler type and its operational conditions, spacing and sprinkler setup in the field and wind speed and direction. If sprinklers are selected and used appropriately considering the aforementioned factors, they can result in higher water distribution uniformities and lower costs. Since the evaluation of all the above-mentioned factors is a complex and time-consuming task, computational simulation is a useful tool for the designing of irrigation systems. This study had as objective to determine, with the aid of computational simulation, the water distribution uniformity of the Plona-RL250 gun sprinkler working under different wind conditions as well as spacing and layouts of gun sprinklers. It was observed that wind direction exerted little influence on the water distribution uniformity values. No advantage was found for the triangular spacing in comparison with the rectangular spacing, except when a spacing less than 40% of the wetted diameter by the sprinkler was used along the main pipeline.
irrigation; gun sprinkler; semi-empirical model
