Understanding Spray Attributes of Commercial UAAS as Impacted by Operational and Design Parameters

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Very good paper overall. I have a couple of minor aspects, which will improve the overall quality of the manuscript.

Line 142. Please add a sentence highlighting what this study is adding to the body of knowledge based on this type of technologies – e.g. linking economic or ecological impact using drone technologies and the use of CPs in agriculture.

Line 144. Section 2.1. For the wider audience of Drones, please add a figure with the two drones, and show some of the important aspects of each drone as related to spray components. I’ve been working with drones in other applications for almost 10years, but I am not familiar with the ones you used in the experiment.

Line 157. Section 2.2. It might be redundant, however, adding a table with the main components per system would be great. A table is easier to digest, especially when the reader is doing a quick read of the main aspects of the paper.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The submission systematically investigates the effects of flight and spray generation parameters on the pesticide (represented by tap water) swath and drift potential. The paper fills the gap in the community by documenting the impact of operating and design parameters of UAAS on the spray performance, hence of significant interest to the readers.  

The reviewer only has minor comments on the paper, which will improve the readability of the documented work. The paper can be considered for publication after these minor revisions.

·       In the abstract, VMD is explained with relative terms like “larger”. It would help the reader to see the nozzle properties directly in the abstract. It is available in the text, but it would be better to report in abstract.

·       Authors use tap water for the experiments, which is fine for a parametric study. Nonetheless, the spray behaviour can change drastically with liquid properties. In the literature, there are reported studies showing variance even with different water sources. Therefore, it should be mentioned in Section 2.2 for the general reader profile.

·       Figure 3 and 4 should be reported with SD bars as in the other figures.

·       In the figures, nozzles are reported with abstract names like XR11001. I would suggest to use more explicit descriptions like VMD and nozzle arrangement to keep the connections with the physics of the problem. At the first read, one has to move back and forth to keep track off it.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

 The purpose of the work is to investigate the effects of various UAAS flight characteristics (such as altitude, speed, etc.), application characteristics (such as droplet size, tank additive, etc.), and UAAS design characteristics (such as nozzle positioning) on spray performance. Although the comparison is not new, this paper is very interesting since the authors have done an extensive and in-depth analysis.

Overall, it is a well-written article, and the topic is interesting indeed. However, the writing is too verbose, and some words and phrases are repeated throughout the text. The authors need to focus on the key ideas. They should select carefully the information included in the article and consider removing some phrases and paragraphs (i.e. lines 125-129 could be deleted or lines 141-142 could be summarised as "1) effective swath and 2) spray drift (ground and airborne) for different commercial UAAS platforms"). This will result in an improvement in the fluency of the text.

The writing style of the paper needs to be made more scientific and formal, and the authors need to unify the styles throughout the article (sometimes the authors use 1st person, sometimes 3rd or passive (line 291)). In addition, a review of the English language is recommended to increase the quality of the paper (i.e. Line 41 "To get an effective control against weeds and insect-pests" is repeated twice, Line 463 "[the] larger … [the] smaller" or Line 591 "a quick method [to] quantify")

The paper is suitable for publication in the Drones journal.

Specific comments:

Line 2

"UAAS Platforms"

The authors should remove "platforms". This reviewer suggests a shorter title, such as "Impact of UAAS Operational and Design Parameters on spraying performance", but it is the author's decision.

Line 65-66

"UAASs" is not correct. UAS or UAV is for imaging purposes, not UAAS.

Line 68

"unmanned airborne systems [UAAS]". It is UAS.

Line 158

Please specify if the flights using the two drones were conducted simultaneously.

Line 282

"drift assess-"

Correct.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx