Edge Computing Instrumentation for Imaging Wetting Front Propagation Using Electrical Impedance Tomography Measurements

Abstract The adequate management of water resources is of national strategic interest to guarantee access, equitable and sustainable distribution of the water resource as a key component for national socio-economic development and the preservation of the environment. In general, agriculture consume the largest volume of water available for consumptive use. Amongst the factors that contribute to irrigation water wastage is the lack of knowledge of the soil hydraulic conductivity properties. Therefore, there are incentives to propose new methods and techniques, in coherence with current trends in agri-instrumentation and information technology systems, to assess the hydraulic conductivity properties of soils, in order to provide hard data that can in turn be used to optimize water resources planning and allocation for irrigation purposes. Here, the authors present an IoT Electrical Impedance Tomography sensor (Electrical impedance Tomography - Wetting Front Detector: EIT-WFD) for in situ monitoring the change of water content in crop soils as irrigation is applied. The distributed computing architecture on the edge allows obtaining data for imaging the soil wetting front propagating down the soil sample, and facilitates the integration of hydraulic conductivity data with other agriculture sensing systems and have important implications for evaluating the effects of irrigation and agricultural management.