DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF INTRA CANOPY SPRAYER FOR FIELD CROPS
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Date
2016-06-30
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UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES, RAICHUR
Abstract
The present application of pesticides in an improper method results in poor penetration of the pesticide to desired locations where insects lay their eggs or hide in other stages of their growth. To improve spray penetration throughout plant canopy, a need was felt to adopt air assistance boom spraying technique to cover a whole crop canopy, air assisted intra canopy sprayer was designed and developed for field crops. The air velocity obtained at nozzle outlets were found to vary from 8.50 to 9.20 m s-1 at 1250 rpm, 10.15 to 11.30 m s-1 at 1450 rpm and 12.50 to 14.20 at 1620 rpm of blower shaft speed. The optimum blower shaft speed was found to be 1620 rpm for better spraying operation to avoid vibration. Hollow cone nozzle exhibited minimum discharge rate of 12.9 l min-1 and maximum discharge rate was recorded as 55.80 l min-1 by flat fan nozzle. It was also observed that the spray uniformity ranged in between 42.56 per cent to 83.12 per cent, which is within the acceptable range of uniformity. The maximum droplet size was 232 µm by solid cone nozzle and minimum was 202 µm by hollow cone nozzle. Droplet density varied for air velocities and operating pressures ranging from 74 to 138 No’s cm-2 for three different types of nozzles tested., The average field capacity of intra canopy sprayer were found to be 0.80 ha h-1 and 0.81 ha h-1 for cotton and pigeon pea crops respectively at forward speed of 2.6 km h-1 and the swath width of spray was found as 3260 mm and 2910 mm respectively for cotton and pigeon pea crops. The average chemical quantity of chemical solution for cotton and pigeon pea crops were 1950 l ha-1 1820 l ha-1 respectively.
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