Author(s):

Himanshu Tripathi, PM D’Souza and Ashok Tripathi

Abstract: The size of droplet affects the plant surface coverage, uniformity and most importantly drift of spraying material from target plant area. The droplet size ranging 140 to 200 µm diameter are recommended for best control of pest in crops. Droplet size less than 140 µm have very much drift and more than 200 µm does not perform well for controlling pest. A study was conducted in plant protection laboratory of ICAR-Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Bhopal. The three commercially available hollow cone nozzles i.e. N1, N2 and N3 having orifice diameter of 2.4, 3.5 and 4.7 mm respectively, were tested at predefined spray pressure levels of 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5 MPa. The result shows the spray droplet size is higher (309.4 μm) at pressure level 0.2 MPa while the smallest droplet size of 147.3 μm was observed at pressure level 0.5 MPa. The maximum relative span factor (RSF) of 1.288 was recorded for N2 at spray pressure level of 0.3 MPa while minimum RSF of 0.896 was recorded for N1 at 0.3 MPa. The maximum droplet size percent value of 52.59 was detected for nozzle N1 at 0.4 MPa spray pressure. The interaction of nozzle and pressure shows significant effect on spray droplet size at 1% significance.

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