Estimating soil texture with laser-guided Bouyoucos

Abstract

The main objective of estimating soil texture is to determine amounts of components of the soil. While the analysis of coarse particles is performed by sieving, Bouyoucos-hydrometer method is used to determine percentages of small particles (silt and clay, also sand). However, these traditional methods require expertise, laboratory environment, sensitive equipment and a long-time period. All of these requirements are overcome by "Laser-Guided Bouyoucos" which is proposed in this study. The proposed device estimates the amount of components of soil by passing laser light through the beaker and evaluates the changes in the magnitude of light. Besides, the device requires no expert or laboratory medium for measurements, can be built using easy-to-find and cheap equipment, and most importantly, can be mobile for in-situ use. Several soil samples preanalysed by Bouyoucos-hydrometer method are used in this study. The error of the proposed device was calculated by summing the absolute errors of sand, silt and clay components, and the average of all errors is only 2.25%. Although more soil samples are needed to test the system, according to the successful results on the used dataset, we believe that soil texture can be analysed quickly without an expert or a laboratory.

Assessing the Effects of Land Use on Surface Water Quality in the Lower uMfolozi Floodplain System, South Africa

“…Paired t -tests were performed in IBM SPSS Statistics version 26 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) in order to determine if differences in water and soil parameters were significant. The observed water parameters were compared to the South African water quality guidelines for agricultural water use in irrigation [ 49 ] to determine the fitness of the wetland water for use. For this purpose, field recorded water parameters were compared to the accepted limits for each parameter ( Table S2 ).…”

“…For this purpose, field recorded water parameters were compared to the accepted limits for each parameter ( Table S2 ). The scientific information underpinning the specification of pollution limits can be found in [ 49 ] Seasonal data for EC and sodium adsorption ratios (SAR) by [ 29 ] were ranked against the irrigation water classes for EC and SAR provided in Table S3 . Hypothesis testing approaches ( t -tests) were performed to determine significant deviations of parameters measured from the field to the South African water quality (SAWQ) guidelines for irrigation.…”

Evaluation of biofertilizers and biochar on the growth characteristics and yield of hot pepper

“…Soil particle size was determined using the Bouyoucos Hydrometer Method (Orhan and Kılınç 2020). But, first, the particle size distribution was determined using the formula:…”