WATER PARTICLE KINEMATICS QUANTUM APPROACH: A CHALLENGE FOR SPRINKLER IRRIGATION SYSTEMS

Designing a sprinkler irrigation plant is always associated with a full understanding of the kinematics of droplets during their aerial path. This requires a very complicated modelling of the problem, as many variables affect one another in contributing to the whole process. The literature offers different descriptive methods among which is the ballistic one, to which the authors have recently given a novel contribution, and which is also reported here. In addition to this, the present paper introduces two novel quantum approaches applied to describe droplet kinematics, based on the time-dependent Schrodinger equation and on the Scale Relativity Theory. Such an idea not only completes the classical description with a mean more tightly describing the microscopic phenomenon but also gives a broadly applicable tool to describe the actual kinematics of water droplets in sprinkler irrigation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. key words: droplet kinematics; spray flow; theoretical modelling; quantum mechanics; Schrodinger equation; Scale Relativity Theory Received 29 November 2011; Revised 12 November 2012; Accepted 13 November 2012

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