A Miniaturized On-Chip Colorimeter for Detecting NPK Elements

Recently, precision agriculture has become a globally attractive topic. As one of the most important factors, the soil nutrients play an important role in estimating the development of precision agriculture. Detecting the content of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) elements more efficiently...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2016-08, Vol.16 (8), p.1234-1234
Main Authors: Liu, Rui-Tao, Tao, Lu-Qi, Liu, Bo, Tian, Xiang-Guang, Mohammad, Mohammad Ali, Yang, Yi, Ren, Tian-Ling
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agriculture
Agriculture - methods
Beer-Lambert’s Law
colorimeter
Colorimeters
Colorimetry - instrumentation
Environmental monitoring
Errors
Lab-On-A-Chip Devices
Micro-Electrical-Mechanical Systems - instrumentation
Microchannels
Microelectromechanical systems
Networks
Nitrogen
Nitrogen - isolation & purification
NPK elements
Nutrients
Phosphorus
Phosphorus - isolation & purification
Potassium
Potassium - isolation & purification
Radiation
Sandwich structures
Sensors
Spectrum analysis
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Summary:Recently, precision agriculture has become a globally attractive topic. As one of the most important factors, the soil nutrients play an important role in estimating the development of precision agriculture. Detecting the content of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) elements more efficiently is one of the key issues. In this paper, a novel chip-level colorimeter was fabricated to detect the NPK elements for the first time. A light source-microchannel photodetector in a sandwich structure was designed to realize on-chip detection. Compared with a commercial colorimeter, all key parts are based on MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical System) technology so that the volume of this on-chip colorimeter can be minimized. Besides, less error and high precision are achieved. The cost of this colorimeter is two orders of magnitude less than that of a commercial one. All these advantages enable a low-cost and high-precision sensing operation in a monitoring network. The colorimeter developed herein has bright prospects for environmental and biological applications.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s16081234