American Journal of Plant Sciences, 2017, 8, 2785-2794
http://www.scirp.org/journal/ajps
ISSN Online: 2158-2750
ISSN Print: 2158-2742
DOI: 10.4236/ajps.2017.811188 Oct. 24, 2017 2785 American Journal of Plant Sciences
How Much Do Adjuvant and Nozzles Models
Reduce the Spraying Drift? Drift in Agricultural
Spraying
Fabiano Griesang
*
, Ricardo Augusto Decaro, Cícero Antônio Mariano dos Santos,
Eduardo Souza Santos, Nelson Henrique de Lima Roque, Marcelo da Costa Ferreira
Nucleus of Study and Development at Technology of Application—NEDTA, São Paulo State University (Unesp), School of
Agricultural and Veterinarian Sciences, Jaboticabal City, Brazil
Abstract
The spraying of herbicides in crops has become the main form of weed con-
trol. Although it means unexpected effects on non-target plants resulted by
spraying drift. Thus, improvements in application techniques, as the best se-
lection of spray nozzles and adjuvant, are essential to avoid environmental
contamination and economic losses. On this work, we evaluate how much
adjuvant associated with nozzles can reduce the spray drift. The nozzles used
at experiment were air induction flat tip, hollow cone and twinjet and the
spray liquids, which were composed of herbicide glyphosate and phosphati-
dylcholine + propionic acid adjuvant. Measurements were made at wind tun-
nel and droplet sizer, at laser diffraction method. The models of nozzles in-
fluence in droplet size characteristics and in occurrence of spray drift. The use
of adjuvants reduces the spray drift only combined with the twinjet nozzle,
while for the other models the adjuvant did not reduce the global spray drift at
significant levels. The adjuvant reduced the spray drift until 39%, while the
nozzles model reduced until 74%. Both techniques when combined were able
to reduce until 80%. The model of nozzle has the biggest result on drift miti-
gation and the use of adjuvants can increase the drift mitigation specially with
nozzles that produces smallest droplets.
Keywords
Droplet Size, Uniformity of Droplets, Span, Volumetric Median Diameter,
Safe Application
1. Introduction
The spraying drift is associated with meteorological conditions at the spraying
How to cite this paper: Griesang, F., De-
caro, R.A., dos Santos, C.A.M., Santos, E.S.,
de Lima Roque, N.H. and da Costa Ferreira,
M. (2017) How Much Do Adjuvant and
Nozzles Models Reduce the Spraying Drift?
Drift in Agricultural Spraying. American
Journal of Plant Sciences, 8, 2785-2794.
https://doi.org/10.4236/ajps.2017.811188
Received: September 5, 2017
Accepted: October 21, 2017
Published: October 24, 2017
Copyright © 2017 by authors and
Scientific Research Publishing Inc.
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution International
License (CC BY 4.0).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Open Access