ID 128

Development Of An Optical Sensor System For Detection Of Herbicide Spray Drift

 

Abstract:

The real time monitoring of herbicide spray droplet drift is important for crop production management and environment protection. In this study, an optical sensor system was developed using a single broadband programmable LED light source and 6 broadband detectors at 610, 680, 730, 760, 810, 860 nm, respectively, to build a monitoring and analysis system for herbicide spray droplet drift. A rotating system with a stepper motor-based was built to shift the fish line under the optical detections to collect the signals that reflect spray drift droplets along the line. To test the system the LED light intensity was varied continuously. After spraying from a hand-held atomizer from 2 m away, the sensor system could identify small (Very Fine and Fine), medium (Medium) and large (Coarse) sizes of droplets .The results indicated that the system could determine the droplet position on the fish line with 100% accuracy without need to use tracer dye. The wavelength of 610 nm was selected as the best among the 6 bands to detect the droplet sizes.