Development of A Real-Time, In-Situ Nitrate Sensor

Abstract

Although nitrate fertilizers are critical for enhancing crop production, excess application of nitrate fertilizer can result in ground water contamination leading to the so called "nitrate problem". Health and environmental problems related to this "nitrate problem" have led to serious concerns in many parts of the world including the United States and Israel. These concerns have resulted in legislation limiting the amount of nitrate N in drinking water to 10mg/g. Development of a fast, reliable, nitrate sensor for in-situ application can be extremely useful in dynamic monitoring of environmentally sensitive locations and applying site-specific amounts of nitrate fertilizer in a precision farming system. The long range objective of this study is to develop a fast, reliable, real-time nitrate sensor. The specific objective of this one year feasibility study was to explore the possible use of nitrate sensor based on mid-IR spectroscopy developed at UCD along with the silver halide fiber ATR (i.e. attenuated total internal reflection) sensor developed at TAU to detect nitrate content in solution and soil paste in the presence of interfering compounds. Experiments conducted at Technion and UCD clearly demonstrate the feasibility of detecting nitrate content in solutions as well as soil pastes using mid-IR spectroscopy and an ATR technique. When interfering compounds such as carbonates, bicarbonates, organic matter etc. are present special data analysis technique such as singular value decomposition (SYD) or cross correlation was necessary to detect nitrate concentrations successfully. Experiments conducted in Israel show that silver halide ATR fiber based FEWS, particularly flat FEWS, resulted in low standard error and high coefficient of determination (i.e. R² values) indicating the potential of the flat Fiberoptic Evanescent Wave Spectroscopy (FEWS) for direct determinations of nitrate. Moreover, they found that it was possible to detect nitrate and other anion concentrations using anion exchange membranes and M1R spectroscopy. The combination of the ion-exchange membranes with fiberoptices offers one more option to direct determination of nitrate in environmental systems.