Ref: C0188

Field tests to estimate spray drift are currently standardized but are very complex, time consuming, expensive and often cannot be compared. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a useful tool to investigate this phenomenon. The airflow generated by the fan of an air-blast sprayer is highly affected by the canopies, which consequently affects the trajectories of spray droplets and has an important influence on drift. Once determined an air flow model in previous work, the subsequent step is to propose a Eulerian-Lagrangian model to predict droplet trajectories, and compare its results with an experimental mass balance in order to assess its validity. Observed differences between experimental and simulation data have been close to the percentage of spray volume that the mass balance reflected as unknown, thus providing encouraging results.