The current regulation strongly encourages the reduction of pesticide doses and prohibits many products, pushing the development of pesticides with low environmental impact. This requires the development of more complex real-time processing strategies to ensure crop protection and thus maintain sufficient yield. Among these innovative strategies, the development of alternative methods based on technical solutions coming from localized irrigation (micro-sprinkler) meets these qualitative and quantitative challenges. This can help significantly reduce the amount of pesticides used, or allow less concentrated products to be used but applied more frequently, provided the sprinklers perform an homogeneous coverage of the crop and limit runoff on leaves and drift losses.

A part of the work involves the dispersion of a jet into drops: it is proposed to develop a method for projecting the fluid allowing a standardization of the droplets size, in order to limit the formation of both too large and very small drops, and thus control their distribution over a restricted perimeter such as a tree hedge. The inputs added to the water can also modify the rheology of the fluid and thus atomization process.

From mostly experimental work, it is envisaged to define the characteristics of a jet (and the means of obtaining it industrially) in order to maintain a maximum range for a minimum jet velocity. Thus producing droplets that are: large enough to make them insensitive to wind and small enough to avoid creating runoff on the plants, thus keeping the treatment product on the plants.

Key words : Atomization, Dispersion, treatment on and under canopy