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Agriculture
Special Issues
Advanced Technology for the Development of Agricultural Sprays
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Advanced Technology for the Development of Agricultural Sprays

A special issue of Agriculture (ISSN 2077-0472). This special issue belongs to the section "Agricultural Technology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 December 2024 | Viewed by 2659

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Giuseppe Ezio Manetto

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Associate Professor, Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment (Di3A), Section of Mechanics and Mechanization, University of Catania, via Santa Sofia, 100, 95123 Catania, Italy
Interests: agricultural machines; pesticide applications (nozzle, sprayers, distribution uniformity, spray drift, worker exposure); mechanical distribution of natural enemies; safety in agriculture (noise and vibrations both in field and food-industry plants); post-harvest (packing lines, mechanical fruit damage); sustainable agriculture (anaerobic digestion plants, biomasses, digestate spreading, erosion, sod-seeding)
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Emanuele Cerruto

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment (Di3A), Section of Mechanics and Mechanization, University of Catania, via Santa Sofia, 100, 95123 Catania, Italy
Interests: pesticide application (foliar deposition, ground losses, worker exposure, spray quality); post-harvest (packing lines, mechanical fruit damage); worker safety (noise and vibration exposure); renewable energies (anaerobic digestion plants, digestate spreading)
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Juan Ramírez-Cuesta

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment (Di3A), Section of Mechanics and Mechanization, University of Catania, via Santa Sofia, 100, 95123 Catania, Italy
Interests: precision agriculture; modelling; sensors; remote sensing; crop stress
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The incorporation of sustainable measures in conducting human activities is garnering increasing importance due to their potential to mitigate climate change and environmental pollution. Specifically, the agricultural sector is one of the biggest contributors to these negative aspects considering its impact on the release of CO2 into the atmosphere, and on the amount of water, chemical fertilizers and Plant Protection Products (PPPs) used. In particular, spraying PPPs, even at the regulatory level, is recognized as one of the most significant agricultural activities which adversely impacts human health and the environment. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate advanced technologies in the field of agricultural sprays, as well as increase the knowledge of the users, in order to adequately recognize pests and diseases, perform localized treatments, reduce drift and ground losses, and limit the workers’ exposure.

This Special Issue aims to collect the most recent studies, including original research, opinions, and reviews, on the technical solutions and methods adopted for the application of PPPs in order to improve the quality, effectiveness, and sustainability of this agricultural operation. To this end, this Special Issue invites submissions of interdisciplinary quality studies from a wide array of research fields including agriculture, engineering design, calculation and modeling, landscaping, environmentalism, as well as ergonomics and occupational risk prevention.

Dr. Giuseppe Ezio Manetto
Dr. Emanuele Cerruto
Dr. Juan Miguel Ramírez-Cuesta
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agriculture is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • pesticides
  • sustainability
  • precision agriculture
  • nozzle spray analysis
  • spray modeling
  • spray drift
  • operator exposure
  • risk assessment
  • sprayer calibration
  • UAV

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue polices can be found here.

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 2832 KiB  
Article
Comparison between Liquid Immersion, Laser Diffraction, PDPA, and Shadowgraphy in Assessing Droplet Size from Agricultural Nozzles
by Salvatore Privitera, Emanuele Cerruto, Giuseppe Manetto, Sebastian Lupica, David Nuyttens, Donald Dekeyser, Ingrid Zwertvaegher, Marconi Ribeiro Furtado Júnior and Beatriz Costalonga Vargas
Agriculture 2024, 14(7), 1191; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture14071191 - 19 Jul 2024
Viewed by 727
Abstract
Spray droplet diameters play a key role in the field of liquid plant protection product (PPP) application technology. However, the availability of various measurement techniques, each with its unique operating principles for evaluating droplet size spectra, can lead to different interpretations of spray [...] Read more.
Spray droplet diameters play a key role in the field of liquid plant protection product (PPP) application technology. However, the availability of various measurement techniques, each with its unique operating principles for evaluating droplet size spectra, can lead to different interpretations of spray characteristics. Therefore, in this study, four measurement techniques—Liquid Immersion (LI), Laser Diffraction (LD), Phase Doppler Particle Analysis (PDPA), and Shadowgraphy (SG)—were utilized to evaluate the droplet size distribution of agricultural spray nozzles. Additionally, PDPA and SG were used to assess the average velocity of spray droplets. Experiments were conducted in three different laboratories with the main aim of comparing results obtained with various types of equipment utilized under ordinary practical conditions. Spraying tests were carried out using three flat fan nozzles and an air-induction flat fan nozzle. As a general trend, the lowest values for droplet diameters were measured using the Laser Diffraction technique, followed by Shadowgraphy. The PDPA technique provided the highest values for mean diameters (D10, D20, and D30) and the numeric median diameter (Dn0.5), whereas the Liquid Immersion method yielded the highest values for the Sauter mean diameter (D32) and volumetric diameters (Dv0.1, Dv0.5, and Dv0.9). Importantly, all measurement techniques were able to discriminate the four nozzles based on their Dv0.5 diameter. Average droplet velocities showed a similar pattern across the four nozzles with the PDPA and the SG measurement techniques. The differences in diameter values observed with the four measurement techniques underline the necessity of always including reference nozzles in spray quality assessments to base classifications on relative rather than absolute values. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Technology for the Development of Agricultural Sprays)
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14 pages, 5593 KiB  
Article
A Simulation and Experiment on the Optimization Design of an Air Outlet Structure for an Air-Assisted Sprayer
by Shuaijie Jing, Longlong Ren, Yue Zhang, Xiang Han, Ang Gao, Baoyou Liu and Yuepeng Song
Agriculture 2023, 13(12), 2277; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13122277 - 15 Dec 2023
Viewed by 1223
Abstract
In response to the issues of low-velocity zones and non-uniform jet velocity distribution in the airflow field of traditional air-assisted orchard sprayers, an arc-shaped air outlet suitable for axial-flow air-assisted systems is designed. This article employs the method of CFD numerical simulation and [...] Read more.
In response to the issues of low-velocity zones and non-uniform jet velocity distribution in the airflow field of traditional air-assisted orchard sprayers, an arc-shaped air outlet suitable for axial-flow air-assisted systems is designed. This article employs the method of CFD numerical simulation and experimental verification to compare and analyze the internal flow field of the air-assisted system and validates the reliability of the numerical simulation results through calculation error and chi-square test. The wind speed of the cross-section is measured at different distances from the outlet, and the distribution characteristics of the outflow field wind speed before and after the structural optimization of the air-assisted system are compared. The horizontal distribution of fog droplets is collected using a fog collection chamber. The experimental results show that the design of the arc-shaped outlet increases the average wind speed of the annular outlet from 14.95 m/s to 18.20 m/s and reduces the proportion of low-speed area from 20.83% to 0.71%. When the rounded corner radius of the air outlet is 50 mm, optimal parameters are attained. The maximum error between the simulated and experimental values is 9.52%. At a significance level of 0.05, the χ2 value is 0.252, indicating that the simulated values follow the distribution of the actual measurement values. On the cross-sections located at distances of 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.25, and 1.5 m from the air outlet, the wind speed distribution with no arc-shaped air outlets exhibits a “low left and high right” type, tending to shift towards the right as a whole. Fog droplets also display a drift tendency towards the right side. The wind speed distribution with arc-shaped air outlets shows a symmetric “high in the middle and low on the sides” type. Fog droplets concentrate in the central position. The optimized air-assisted system can reduce the air field’s low-flow area, increase the airflow distribution uniformity, improve the average wind speed at the outlet, and decrease fog droplet drift. This provides a reference for the structural design of air-assisted systems in current orchard sprayers of the same type. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Technology for the Development of Agricultural Sprays)
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