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Patternator to Be Used for Workshops

OMAFRA staff have worked together this spring to build an orchard sprayer patternator. This piece of equipment should play a key role in measuring the performance of the orchard sprayers to be tested at the upcoming Sprayer Performance Workshops in late June and early July. See the announcement at the end of this newsletter. 

Many remember the talk given by Dr. Andrew Landers in February at Brock University. Andrew showed a couple of versions of the patternator they have used to test the performance of orchard sprayers in New York State. These are variants of the type of equipment used in Europe to look at sprayer performance. 

They all do more or less the same thing. That is to collect a sample of the wall of spray at different vertical heights, from ~1 foot up to 12 feet and higher, while the sprayer is operating in a stationary position. 

The patternator we built in Ontario and to be used later this month is based on a series of collection screens positioned every 30 centi-meters or every foot up a telescoping frame work. The screens will allow a certain amount of spray through without interrupting pattern set up by the sprayer itself. What is measured is the relative proportion of the total amount of spray coming from a bank of nozzles and it is collected by the screens at different heights. See Figure 1. 

By comparison, in New York they have used both the screen design and a design that uses funnels and sends the collected spray liquid by gravitational forces to a rack of graduated cylinders on the ground. The idea then, is to correct or verify the symmetry of the spray profile by modifying nozzle angle/size, airflow and general set-up. 

The key element of our design is the telescoping framework that holds the set of collection screens. Each screen has been fitted with a trough and downspout that sends the captured liquids down and into a rack of cylinders. Each cylinder represents a specific height on the tower. 

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Figure 1. Helmut Speiser, Pesticide Application Engineer with OMAFRA discusses sprayer options with apple growers at a test site in the London area. The patternator is shown on the right hand side of the photo.