Droplet Formation and Deposition1

At the EPPO Conference in Belgrade on 1970 the author reported on work showing that small, uniform, and non-volatile droplets appeared to offer the prospect for greatly reduced dosages of pesticides by both providing a more effective deposit and by controlling drift. Three recent studies provide further evidence for this hypothesis, which questions the very principles on which our present spraying practices are based. However, the deposition of droplets by the external forces of wind and gravity imposes lower limits on the droplet sizes capable of being used. These are 30 μm for insecticides and fungicides (except in the case of flying insects) and 150 μm for herbicides, since the droplets require sufficient energy to impact themselves on the target. Electrostatic charging of droplets promises to free us from these size constraints by providing the droplet with a depositional force of its own, allowing it to impact on any surface. Electrostatics, however, is solely a force of deposition and thus must be balanced with the forces required for spray dispersion so that the droplets can penetrate the crop canopy and/or be transported to the target