Digital twin tool for orchard and vineyard spray optimisation

Spray drift in orchards can result in up to 70% of pesticides missing their targets, causing waste, pollution, and legal risks. While digital twin technologies offer a way to simulate and optimise spray applications, current solutions often simplify canopy geometry and rely on slow, serial computing. Dr Liqi Han at the University of Queensland has built a GPUaccelerated spray simulation engine that models the explicit movement of individual droplets in three-dimensional space. Built using NVIDIA’s CUDA framework, the simulator leverages parallel processing to update droplet position and velocity at millisecond intervals, capturing fine-scale interactions with canopy structures.