Post Doctoral Research Fellow Dr Surya P. Bhattarai was one of the successful contestants for 2008 AINSE award to develop research collaboration between CQUniversity and ANSTO.Centre for Plant and Water Science (CPWS) Post Doctoral Research Fellow Dr Surya P. Bhattarai and PhD Scholar Manouchehr Torabi have just completed a 4-day research activity using water tunnel facilities at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology (ANSTO) facility in Sydney.

The research activity hoped to unravel the bubble behaviour in irrigation water streams during oxygation - the process used to aerate water for subsurface drip irrigation.

Optimizing the aeration rate in the irrigated stream improves the crop yield and water use efficiency of aerated subsurface drip irrigation, therefore holding tremendous potential for future  irrigation industries Australia wide.

Due to the importance of bubbles in oxygation, researchers have for a long time been interested in development of bubble measurement systems (BMSs) to determine the bubble size distribution.

"The PIV technique at ANSTO allowed us to analyze the behavior of the air bubbles in the pressurized irrigation line sections in the irrigated flow stream, which are like the cloud of air in the water," Dr Bhattarai said.

"Affordable high quality-charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras and image processing software are powerful tools for bubble measurements. Because of the wide variation between bubble populations, different bubble measurement systems are required depending upon the application."

Dr Bhattarai is working in close cooperation with David Wassink, chief of Reactor Operations at ANSTO, for the use of these facilities.

CQUniversity and ANSTO put a funding application to ANISE last year and were able to secure the funding for the research this year.

CQUniversity doctoral fellow Mr Manouchehr Torabi (Left), with ANSTO scientist David Wassink running an experiment for monitoring of aeration uniformity along the 250m long aerated irrigation stream at ANSTO in Sydney. Over the past 2 years, Dr Bhattarai and Mr Wassink have continuously communicated to initiate the ground work on visualization of the aerated irrigation stream.

"It was a great opportunity and good timing this year for us to start the project and move on the work on bubble visualization.

"This work will help us to determine whether this tool can be developed further for monitoring of aerated irrigation water streams in the field."

Collaborating on this project has brought CPWS and ANSTO together for more collaborative research work in the future.

Dr Bhattarai and Mr Wassink will apply to AINSE  for the 2009 round of collaborative research funding applications to further develop the work on oxygation uniformity.