Cleaning performance of a pneumatic-based SSCDS designed for crop protection in modern orchard systems

Fixed spray delivery system (FSDS) offers several potential advantages over the conventional pesticide application equipment (PAE) in modern orchard and vineyard production systems. A FSDS consists of three main components: (i) a spray delivery system – an emitter network placed in the crop canopy where emitters are permanently plumbed to reservoirs and a main pipeline installed along the crop row, (ii) a pumping station – tank and a pump, to fill the system with spray mixture, and (iii) a cleaning system – a device that is used to deliver the spray mixture and to clean the spray delivery system. A pneumatic spray delivery (PSD)-based solid set canopy delivery system (SSCDS), a FSDS variant, has been optimized in the United States (Sinha et al., 2020) for spray applications. In the PSD-based SSCDS, an air compressor is used to push fluid through the spray lines for both the liquid delivery (through the emitters) and cleaning of all the components in the spray delivery system. The increasing interest in PSD-based SSCDS highlights the need to evaluate the system compliance to the actual ISO mandatory regulation. Also considering the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive (SUD) requirements, it is critical to ensure the humane and environmental safety of such PAE. Therefore, this study evaluated PSD-based SSCDS, first in laboratory and then in field condition, towards its cleaning performances following the ISO 22368-1:(2004) standard methodology.