Air flow characteristics of an air-assisted sprayer through horizontal crop canopy

Artificially induced air currents or air-assistance to droplet spectrum produced by hydraulic nozzles not only facilitate in transporting and depositing the droplets in different parts of canopy but also reduce the application rate of chemicals.The air streams increase the velocity of smaller droplets so that extra momentum would increase impaction and improve penetration into the crop as well as mitigating the influence of wind on drift.It is necessary to quantify the airflow characteristics.But,control of climatic and other conditions in the field is very difficult.Thus,airflow characteristics study was done under controlled conditions on a horizontal simulated crop canopy.Based on this study,an airflow distribution model was developed and airflow characteristics for vegetable crops,namely,eggplant,chilli and bittergourd were predicted.The differences between predicted and actual field study values were not statistically significant.Kinetic energy of air stream dissipated with its movement from top to bottom of the canopy.The rate of kinetic energy dissipation was higher in denser canopies.Higher air velocity 15 m/s was the best as it produced maximum turbulence throughout the canopy.

A survey of high resolution image processing techniques for cereal crop growth monitoring

This paper presents a survey of image processing techniques proposed in the literature forextracting key cereal crop growth metrics from high spatial resolution, typically proximalimages. The descriptive crop growth metrics considered are: crop canopy cover, aboveground biomass, leaf area index (including green area index), chlorophyll content, andgrowth stage. The paper includes an overview of relevant fundamental image processingtechniques including camera types, colour spaces, colour indexes, and image segmentation. The descriptive crop growth metrics are defined. Reference methods for groundtruth measurement are described. Image processing methods for metric estimation aredescribed in detail. The performance of the methods is reviewed and compared. The surveyreveals limitations in image processing techniques for cereal crop monitoring such as lackof robustness to lighting conditions, camera position, and self-obstruction. Directions forfuture research to improve performance are identified.

DETERMINATION OF AERODYNAMIC PARAMETERS OF CROP CANOPIES WITH A CENTER-OF-PRESSURE METHOD

Using data on leaf area density and wind profiles above and within canopies of wheat,rice,soybean and corn,the center-of-pressure method (CPM),originally proposed by Thom (1971),is first validated in the field.A physically-based model for directly calculating zero-displacement height (d) is derived.The comparison between the friction velocity (u_*) estimated with CPM and that with eddy correlation technique shows that CPM not only works well in the field,but also produces more steady and accurate estimates of aerodynamic parameters (which are hardly affected by atmospheric thermal stability),than those with the widely-used log-profile fitting method in diabatic atmosphere. The results presented in this paper also demonstrate that the ratios of d,z_0 to crop height h usually vary with canopy ar- chitecture,atmospheric stratification and turbulent exchange intensity,and are not just constants as commonly assumed or used.d/h raises with an increase of relative height of the maximum foliage layer and wind extinction coefficient within the canopy.Only for crops with short stem and moderate foliage density,can the relations d= 0.64h,z_0=0.08h keep stable.In addition,for long stem crops or sparse canopies,the fairly large shear stress at the soil surface and the va- riation of the exponent in the relationship between drag coefficient and wind speed undoubtedly influence the accuracy of CPM to a certain extent.