Development and Evaluation of a Gas Flamer with The Ability of Targeted-discrete Flaming in Locating and Eradicating Weeds

Farmers are now more interested in application of weed control methods and tools with less environmental side effects. Flame weeding using propane gas is an approach with almost no any chemical residue on the soil and plant surfaces or underground water. In this research, a flame weeding machine with the ability of uniform and also discrete flaming was developed and evaluated in laboratory and field scales. In this apparatus, machine vision technology successfully discriminates between soil and weeds (plants grown in between the corn rows are considered as weeds) under natural illumination. In the laboratory tests, the effect of three forward speeds (0.5, 0.7 and 0.9 m s-1) on flam leading or lagging was investigated. The feasibility of using this technology for site-specific weed control of a corn field in comparison with conventional continuous flaming was investigated. The field trials were conducted with both continuous and discrete flaming approaches. The system performance and weed response to flaming treatments were evaluated by measuring the fuel consumption, counting the number of and weighting the survived and dead weeds one and three days after each flaming treatment. The results of laboratory tests showed that the effect of forward speed on system accuracy was significant and the system performance was more accurate at forward speeds of 0.5 and 0.7 m s-1 than 0.9 m s-1. According to the field experiments, continuous and discrete flaming methods exhibited similar results in eradication of weeds (both number and weight-based), while the fuel consumption of the discrete flaming was lower than the continuous one. The results also showed that discrete flaming by employing machine vision technology could be an efficient substitute for continuous flaming due to its lower fuel consumption and potential reduction of air pollution as well as other benefits of flame weeding.