Semi-empirical method for analysis of cultivated soils

Abstract

The main objective of the present work to develop Semi-empirical Method (SEM) which can provide analysis of cultivated soil-samples non-destructively. Gamma-ray transmission measurement of soil-sample provides information about its parameters such as mass attenuation coefficient, mass-density, water content and porosity. These parameters further quantify soils suitability for particular crop and irrigation system to be used for the cultivation of particular crop. Soil-samples have been collected from the cultivated soils of Punjab (India). Chemical-compositions of these samples have been measured with XRDR (x-ray Diffraction followed by Rietveld analysis). Three standard γ-ray point-isotropic sources have been used for experimental measurements of these parameters for the samples in the energy-range (59.54-1332.5 keV). A standardized self-designed computer program has been used for theoretical computations of these parameters. Good agreement between spectrometric-method (experimental) and theoretical-method (TM) have been observed with ±5% fluctuations. It is concluded that by measuring chemical composition of soil, its other parameters can be computed theoretically, thus the present methods is named as SEM. Thus, SEM is a nondestructive soil analysis (NDSA) without any loss of valuable information.