Development of a sensor controlled system for application with flame weeding technology

Flame weeding is a standard technique in farm-scale vegetable production. Nowadays the importance of flame weeding increases, particularly if the use of herbicides is generally prohibited or restricted as in organic farming or water protection areas.  Flame weeding as a weed control method is essential in vegetable crops like carrot, beetroot, onion and field salad. The trend of increasing energy costs requires a tight efficiency and process control is desirable. Moreover after a suboptimal flame weeding a cost-intensive manual weeding is necessary which should be avoided. Therefore this project dealt with the improvement and optimization of flame weeding. An optical sensor for weed detection and a thermoplastic material as a heat energy indicator were developed. In several laboratory and field experiments the technique was tested. The results demonstrate that the optical sensor can be used as a weed detector, site-specific operation is possible and the thermoplastics can be used as a decision support tool to optimize the setting of a flame weeder.