Development and Experiment of an Air-Assisted Sprayer for Vineyard Pesticide Application

This paper presents an air-assisted sprayer for vineyard pesticide application. The spraying unit was designed with two symmetrically arranged ports. The airflow velocity distribution of the sprayer was investigated using a combination of experimental validation and a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. The results of both the simulation and the experiment showed good agreement in airflow velocity, and the distribution was uniform. Both unilateral and bilateral spraying field experiments were conducted in this study. The unilateral spraying experiment showed that higher spray pressure and lower sprayer speed increased both total deposition coverage and spray penetration (SP), while shorter spray distances improved SP but decreased total deposition coverage. The optimal operational conditions for the sprayer were determined as follows: spray pressure of 0.40 MPa, sprayer speed of 0.83 m/s, and spray distance of 1.00 m. The results of the bilateral spraying field experiment indicated that the coefficient of variation (CV) for deposition coverage in Columns A, B, and C were 16.20%, 8.10%, and 15.47%, respectively. The CVs in Layers a, b, and c were 6.14%, 12.62%, and 6.74%, respectively. This result demonstrated that the deposition coverage distribution in the canopy was relatively uniform, and the air-assisted sprayer exhibited good spray penetration performance. This study demonstrates the effectiveness and potential of the air-assisted sprayer for vineyard pesticide application.