A Fast Analysis of Pesticide Spray Dispersion by an Agricultural Aircraft Very near the Ground

Ji King, Xinyu Xue, Weixiang Yao and Zhen Jin
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Ji King: Nanjing Institute of Agricultural Mechanization, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Nanjing 210014, China
Xinyu Xue: Nanjing Institute of Agricultural Mechanization, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Nanjing 210014, China
Weixiang Yao: College of Information and Electrical Engineering, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang 110866, China
Zhen Jin: School of Information, Guangzhou Xinhua University, Guangzhou 523133, China

Agriculture, 2022, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-27

Abstract: This study provides a fast analysis of pesticide spray trails and dispersion influenced by crosswind, headwind, velocity field and the wake of an agricultural aircraft approaching the ground, to improve operational efficiency and reduce environmental impact. The lifting line-wingtip vortices mixture model is proposed to calculate induced velocity field around a monoplane far to 190 wingspans downstream, and N-vortex system based on point vortex dynamics is applied to simulate vortex rebound and vortex motion on considering extreme ground effect. The droplet trajectories governed by wake vortices and their induced velocity field are therefore determined under the Lagrangian framework. According to the ground deposition of typical droplets, the Gaussian mixture model is employed to predict droplet drift or dispersal for the whole spectrum of droplets in the spanwise direction. The fast analysis is compared to AGDISP and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation for Thrush 510G aircraft, which runs on a common personal computer (CPU 2 GHz, memory 2 GB) within 3.2 s, faster than AGDISP and CFD, and does not rely on swath width input needed by AGDISP. The results suggest crosswind speed and droplet size are two leading factors affecting the drift and ground deposition. To increase droplet size or reduce the portion of fine droplets, the pesticide drift can be suppressed in some degrees.

Keywords: crop protection; aerial spraying; pesticide dispersion; droplet trajectory; ground effect; wake vortices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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