Drift Reduction by Orienting Boom Sprayers’ Nozzles Against the Wind Direction

Wind drift is a very critical issue in pesticide applications. In recent experiments, the application of pesticides is focus on precision farming. In this study, a spraying system that could manipulate trajectories of droplets to decrease drift was tested in a wind tunnel. Three nozzles (XR11002, AIXR11002 and TTJ6011002) were used at three operating pressures (200 kPa, 300 kPa, 400 kPa), with four orientation angles of nozzles against wind direction (0°, 5°, 10°, 15°), and three wind velocities (1.5 m s-1, 2 m s-1 and 2.5 m s-1) with three repetitions. A statistical factorial CRD was used with Tukey Post Hoc Test to determine the significance of the differences between treatment means. The results from the experiment showed that the downwind drift as spray pattern displacements were significantly reduced in the angled position of the nozzles compared to the non-angled position. The highest downwind drift reductions were achieved with AIXR11002 (38.47%) under conditions of 200 kPa pressure, 2 m s-1 wind velocity and 15° orientation angle. and for TTJ6011002 (34.41%) under conditions of 200 kPa pressure, 1.5 m s-1 wind velocity and 15° orientation angle. Even the XR11002 nozzle, which had the highest drift potential among selected nozzles achieved about 22.56% downwind drift reduction at 200 kPa pressure, 2 m s-1 wind velocity and 10°orientation angle.