The new year brings some success in research funding. Recently, a project led by Prof. Yael Dubowski (Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Technion) and Dr. Ran Lati (Newe Ya’ar) was selected for funding by the Chief Scientist fund of the Ministry of Agriculture.
The main goal of the research is to examine the effect of technical and biological factors on the effectiveness of the application of herbicides from drones and to define clear guidelines for the effective operation of this technology. To this end, the following goals were defined:
1) Characterization of the flow field around the drone during its operation as a function of the turbulence intensity upwind of it.
2) Examining the effect of technical and environmental parameters on the distribution of droplet sizes and their depositional layout.
3) Examining the effect of weed species, growth stage and herbicide type on the agronomic efficiency of spraying herbicides from drones.
4) Development of an optimization algorithm for a spray route from a drone.
5) Measuring spraying efficiency under field conditions from a physical, agronomic and environmental perspectives.
