ARS | Publication request: DRIFTSIM -- A USER-FRIENDLY COMPUTER PROGRAM TO PREDICT DRIFT DISTANCES OF DROPLETS

Submitted to: Meeting Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: July 27, 2004
Publication Date: October 26, 2004
Repository URL: http://www.ars.usda.gov/sp2UserFiles/Place/36071000/Publications/Zhu170812_2004_Driftsim.pdf
Citation: Zhu, H., Fox, R.D., Ozkan, H.E., Derksen, R.C., Krause, C.R. 2004. An application computer program (DRIFTSIM) to predict drift distances of water droplets from field sprayers. In: Ramsay, C., Hewitt, A. , Thistle, H., Hoffman, C., Wold, R., Wolf, T. (editors) Proceedings of International Conference on Pesticide Application for Drift Management. October 27-29, 2004. Waikoloa, Hawaii. p. 317-323.

Technical Abstract: A Visual BASIC language computer program (DRIFTSIM) in Windows Version was developed to rapidly estimate the mean drift distances of discrete sizes of water droplets discharged from atomizers on field sprayers. This program interpolates values from a large data base of drift distances originally calculated for single droplets with a flow simulation program (FLUENT). The simulations of drift distances up to 200 m (656 ft) included temperatures (10-30 °C; 50-86°F), discharge heights (0-2.0 m; 0-6.56 ft), initial downward droplet velocities (0-50 m/s; 0-164 ft/s), relative humidities (10-100%), wind velocities (0-10.0 m/s; 0-32.8 ft/s), droplet sizes (10-2000 µm), and 20% turbulence intensity. The program requires about 15.5 Mb of disk space. Variables can be either in metric or English units and input can be either individual droplet sizes or size classes with portion of volume in each class.