RESEARCH ARTICLE
Comparison between Horizontal and Vertical Lamellate Patternators for Air-blast Sprayers
Marcello Biocca*, Pietro Gallo
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2014Volume: 8
First Page: 12
Last Page: 17
Publisher ID: TOASJ-8-12
DOI: 10.2174/1874331501408010012
Article History:
Received Date: 05/03/2014Revision Received Date: 26/05/2014
Acceptance Date: 04/06/2014
Electronic publication date: 27/6/2014
Collection year: 2014
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Among the possible sources of environmental contamination by plant protection products, the use of air blast sprayers in orchards and vineyards can be very critical. The evaluation of the vertical distribution pattern is a crucial test to achieve a good quality of spray application. The aim of the paper was to compare the performance of a vertical lamellate patternator versus a horizontal lamellate patternator. For this aim, an experimental device that allows the use of the same patternator, mounting the lamellae either horizontally or vertically, was utilized. The results showed that using the patternator with vertical lamellae a greater amount of liquid, 25% , was collected than using the horizontal lamellae under the same test conditions. This amount represented the 36.7% of the total sprayed volume. The performance of patternator may be related to the reduced disturbance of the air flow induced by vertical lamellae. Although the amount of liquid collection is not considered the only parameter to assess the quality of a patternator, this characteristic can improve the efficiency of the test, especially when low volume orchard sprayers are tested.