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Abstract.

To reduce health risk and environmental pollution for agricultural sprayers used in orchards and ornamental nurseries, an Arduino platform based automatic premixing inline injection system for sprayers was developed. This system consisted of a fluid metering pump, a water pump, a static mixer, a premixing tank and a buffer tank. Specified volume of water and chemical concentrates were accurately dispensed into premixing tank through a static mixer. Then, the mixture was transferred into a buffer tank for the spray pump to discharge. When the buffer tank neared empty, this process was repeated automatically. The sucrose solution with various viscosities as simulated pesticides was used to evaluate mixing uniformity of the spray mixtures discharged from the inline injection system. The test results showed that, for different desired concentrates (0.1% - 2%), the premixing inline injection system provided consistent mixing uniformity of spray mixtures at the outlet, the highest relative error and coefficient of variation were 7.6% and 4.5%, respectively. The new premixing inline injection system based on Arduino developing platform was stable, accurate, and can further improve spray application efficiency for agricultural sprayers.