Characterising plant surfaces for spray adhesion and retention

By R. Gaskin, K. Steele, W. A. Forster. 2005

105 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A simple measurement of static contact angle of aqueous acetone droplets on surfaces has been developed for characterising leaf surfaces. It allows leaves to be compared and grouped by their surface “roughness factor” and it differentiates between easy, diffi cult and very diffi cult-to-wet species. This paper describes how the method has been used to survey a large number of plant species, including weeds and crops, fruit and foliage. High contact angles indicate diffi cult-to-wet surfaces. The quantitative measure of contact angle is a useful tool to predict spray droplet adhesion and rank plant surfaces for retention properties. It can also indicate whether surfactant addition is likely to be benefi cial for agrochemical sprays targeted at fruit or foliage on different crops. Surfactants were most useful for improving spray droplet adhesion and retention on diffi cult-to-wet surfaces, but results varied with surface wettability, surfactant type and concentration, and with plant architecture.

Subfields: Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b24ddbf19259ac8e47f03b876daba64b07f60aa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. M. Massinon
2. Nicolas De Cock
3. J. Nairn
4. W. A. Forster
5. F. Lebeau
6. S. McCue

Citations in the corpus

• Spray droplet impaction outcomes for different plant species and spray formulations (2017, background): “Table 1 shows the relative wettability of each species as defined by Gaskin et al. (2005).”