Ozone pest control of grain

Abstract

Grain insect pests impact adversely on the agrarian industry. Insects make a significant portion of crops to become unusable. During storage, lacking proper monitoring and control, different pests tend to grow in grains. In the laboratory conditions, grain cereal heaps are most often infested by grain weevils and flour beetles. Since pests are growing very rapidly, it is necessary to immediately apply pest control actions. Ozonation can effectively destroy a large proportion of insects. However, the recommended ozone concentrations for disinfection are excessive and very hazardous for humans. Therefore, lower ozone concentrations should be applied for treatment. To this end, concentrations of ozone ranging from 1.4 to 5 mg/m3 with an exposure interval of 5 hours is found to be sufficient to completely exterminate the grain weevil. It is very difficult to maintain a constant dose of the used gas mixture, so one should focus on the concentration of ozone above 1.0 g·min/m3. To completely exterminate the flour beetle, it is necessary to ozonize under the given conditions for more than 8 hours. In this situation, the ozone concentration should surpass 1.8 g·min/m3. Ozonation is carried out until the death of 40… 50% of insects, the remaining part dies over the next day.