Email:
satyaprakashkumar27@gmail.com
Address:
ICAR-Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh 462038, India
The application of pesticides is one of the important aspects of a crop production system. The development of a single spraying system for all types of pesticide application is a solution for a cost-effective and efficient crop production system. Standardizing the droplet sizes at different operating pressure of hollow cone nozzle will be a solution for controlling the weeds as well as the other pests. A small tractor-operated hollow cone-based boom sprayer was developed to overcome said problems. The developed sprayer can be mounted on three-point linkage and can be operated by tractor PTO. The developed system was evaluated for 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3 MPa of operating pressure through water-sensitive papers and ImageJ software. Under this pressure, the selected hollow cone nozzle produced medium to coarser droplet size. The highest VMD of 346.4 µm was obtained under operating pressure of 0.1 MPa and the least VMD of 277.1 µm was obtained under operating pressure of 0.3 MPa. The increase in operating pressure causes a reduction in droplet size. However, the relative span (RS) was increasing with a decrease in operating pressure. It was 0.72 at an operating pressure of 0.3 MPa and increased to 1.27 at an operating pressure of 0.1 MPa. The highest weed control efficiency (WCE) of 88.1% was obtained under 0.1 MPa of operating pressure. However, the operating pressure does not had significant effect on WCE.
Boom sprayer, Hollow cone nozzle, Small tractor, Volume mean diameter, Weed control efficiency