Tirat Zvi - Mixing Junctions | Israel

Tirat Zvi, a kibbutz that sits just west of the Jordan River, is the largest date-palm grower in Israel, with 18,000 trees.
The water used to irrigate these trees and other crops grown on the kibbutz come from two sources: a potable water line, the ‘sweet line’, supplied by Israel’s national water company, Mekorot, at a high cost and a kibbutz-owned well that pumps saline water from the aquifer. As a result, the customer was required to mix expensive potable water with less expensive, high salinity water, in order to obtain an optimal balance between water quality and cost while maximizing crops quality and saving water.

To achieve an optimal balance between water quality and cost, while also maximizing crop quality and saving water, Tirat Zvi mixes the expensive potable water with the less expensive, but highly-saline, water from the well. This takes place at a mixing junction on the kibbutz’s water irrigation supply line. However, the existing third-party hydraulic valve was not optimizing salinity levels. What’s more, since the pressure level varies between the two branches which feed in water from Mekorot and from the well respectively, an additional challenge arose regarding how to achieve higher pressure levels in the well branch.

Our goal was to provide a smart solution, to be installed on the existing water infrastructure, that would ensure the optimal salinity level and balance the pressure of the two branches.

First step was to turn the existing hydraulic valve into an electrically-controlled valve, by installing the ConDor controller on the well water source (which was kept at a higher pressure). This controls the output of the mixing junction and maintains an optimal level of electric conductivity. To accommodate the ConDor command, the existing control trim was replaced with a simple, two-solenoid control trim.

A true Smart It Up installation – turning an existing third-party hydraulic valve into a smart water system

To maintain higher pressure on the saline water line source, a Differential Pressure Sustaining system was installed on the potable water line from Mekorot. This keeps a constant pressure differential between the sweet water line and the well (saline) waterline, guaranteeing optimal functionality of the mixing junction function, and ensuring that the irrigation water is at the permitted salinity level.

Thanks to the proper regulating of the two water sources that the A.R.I.-Dorot Smart Water Solution controls, Tirat Zvi is now assured of the correct level of water salinity for the crops being irrigated, while maximizing cost efficiency. At the same time, the smart system controls real-time, on-site, field communication via mobile phones and the cloud, further streamlining the kibbutz’s date-palm growing operations to make them more efficient.