DEVELOPMENT OF A LOW COST NITRATE DETECTION SOIL SENSOR
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Agriculture is one of the key sectors in India wherein harmful pesticides and fertilizers are heavily used nowadays. They contribute largely to the soil and water contamination. Usually, farmers make excessive use of these supplies which in return can cause negative effects to the environment. So watching the agricultural environment is important in order to maintain the stability of the soil. Modern measures to tackle these issues of contamination generally need tough operational ways which involve heavy investments. This study gives a substitute method for the detection of contamination by designing an array based sensor with the combination of capacitive and inductive electromagnetic fields for monitoring the content in agricultural soils and contamination. The purpose is to fabricate this array design of the sensor on printed circuit board (double-sided PCB FR4). A set of demonstrations were conducted to study the characteristic features of the sensor. The performance of the system was observed where the sensors were tested with various soil samples mixed with a different concentration of nitrate in proportion with water. Based on the results obtained, the sensor array can be used to measure contamination in the soils and the data obtained from the experiment is compared. ...learn more
Project status: Published/In Market
Overview / Usage
In recent years, soil is degrading in terms of quality due to uncontained human activities. So the planar electromagnetic sensor can be reviewed as a rising technology in the context of detecting the contamination within the soil due to its simple design, easy fabrication, and cheaper cost characteristics. From the testing and experiments done based on the conductivity variation versus contamination over a period of time, it can be said that the planar electromagnetic sensor can detect the contamination within the soil. However, all the sensors have a different profile and the star configured sensor has the highest sensitivity. In order to ensure better sensitivity for all sensors in configuration the power delivered to the individual sensor in the configuration needs to be improved. From the development of the sensor, it is expected that the sensors can detect various elements of contamination and also an improvised design of the sensor can be researched. It can be used as a tool for water sources monitoring in the farm where the nitrate level should not exceed 10 mg/L. Also, SMS updates to the farmer can be helpful to keep a continuous check on nitrate content in the soil.
Methodology / Approach
Following are the points highlighting the approach followed for implementation of this project:
- Literature overview of traditional methods used to check the contamination.
- Addressing the challenges involved by use of this in-house method of sensor development on a very simple concept of electromagnetism of interfering field after excitation.
- Building and Simulation of the sensor body. Closely watching the excitation profile virtually using COMSOL.
- Observing the sensitivity profile; selecting the greatly responding sensor design (out of Star or parallel layout).
- Integrating with a controller and observing the expected output and its deviation.
NPK is the important source minerals for the growth of a plant, out of which I choose to work on Nitrate for this application and implementation.
Technologies Used
Software: COMSOL Multiphysics, Altium designer suite, and LabView.
Hardware: Arduino Atmega 2560, converter AC/DC DB107, step down transformer, LCD display.