Design and Experimental Study of Ball-Head Cone-Tail Injection Mixer Based on Computational Fluid Dynamics

Yixin Shi, Siliang Xiang, Minzi Xu, Defan Huang, Jianfei Liu, Xiaocong Zhang and Ping Jiang ()
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Yixin Shi: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China
Siliang Xiang: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China
Minzi Xu: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China
Defan Huang: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China
Jianfei Liu: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China
Xiaocong Zhang: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China
Ping Jiang: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China

Agriculture, 2023, vol. 13, issue 7, 1-21

Abstract: The uniform and accurate mixing of pesticides in water is a necessary prerequisite for plant protection, especially for enabling precise variable spraying, and is also an important method to achieve a precise reduction in pesticide spraying. In order to ensure the uniform mixing of pesticides and water and solve the problems of traditional injection mixers, such as the limited range in the mixing ratio and unadjustable proportion, an active injection liquid mixer is designed in this paper. The mixer can be matched with an online mixing and spraying device to achieve accuracy in mixing and spraying. In this paper, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method is used to optimize the structure of the mixer. Through comparative analysis, the optimal structure of the mixer was found. It has a spherical head and conical tail, the number of guide plates is seven, and the shape is semicircular. By calculating the volume fraction of pesticide distribution under different cross-sections, the coefficient of variation in the process of mixing is obtained. The analysis shows that the maximum coefficient of variation of the ball-head cone-tail active injection mixer was 2.88% (lower than the allowable 5%) with a mixing ratio ranging from 300:1 to 3000:1. At the same time, image analysis methods of high-definition photography and ultraviolet spectrophotometry were used to analyze the mixing effect of the mixer. The test results show that, when the pressure of the pesticide injection is 1 MPa, the distribution of the pesticide and water in the ball-head cone-tail injection mixer is more uniform under different mixing ratios, and it has a better spatio-temporal distribution uniformity with the concentration changing a little at different times and different spatial locations. The mixer can provide a theoretical reference and technical support for the subsequent realization of an accurate online variable spray.

Keywords: pesticides with water; CFD; injection mixer; spatio-temporal homogeneity; coefficient of variation (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: 2023
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