Study of DC and AC electric field effect on Pisum sativum seeds growth

¹ Faculty of Plasma Physics, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Campus, Simon Bolivar Street, Ashrafi Esfehani Avenue, Tehran, Iran
² Faculty of Engineering, Islamic Azad University, Garmsar Branch, Iran

^a e-mail: mahmoodbahar@yahoo.com

Received: 23 October 2013
Revised: 9 March 2014
Accepted: 10 March 2014
Published online: 11 July 2014

Abstract

In this research the effect of electric field on two groups of wet and dry Pisum sativum seeds growth was studied. To generate the required electric field a parallel-plate capacitor with round copper plates of 30 cm diameter was used. The experiments were performed once in fixed exposure duration of 8 min in variable DC electric field of 0.25–1.5 kV/m. The other experiments were performed in variable fields of 50–125 kV/m in fixed exposure duration of 8 min, in two groups of AC and DC electric fields. The experiments were repeated three times. In each experiment 10 seeds were used and there was a sham exposed group for comparison, too. After application of electric field, the seeds were kept for six days in the same growth chamber with the temperature of 25 ± 1 °C and 12 h light/12 h darkness. On the 6th day length of stems and height of roots were measured. After doing statistical analysis, in low intensities of DC electric field, the highest significant increase of mean growth (The average of stem length and the height of roots) was seen in 1.5 kV/m in wet seeds. In high intensities of DC and AC electric fields, the highest significant increase of mean growth was seen in AC electric field of 100 kV/m in wet seeds.