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Animal Husbandry
Important research programs are carried out all over the globe to better characterize the emission rates in animal husbandry activity. Large databases are subsequently used to model the environmental footprint and to identify and promote the best environmental practices (eg. for feeding diets, waste management).
Besides the study of greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, and N2O), ammonia (NH3) is a primary monitoring target because of its strong impact on the local environment but also on the animal wellness.
The Challenge
Scientific teams working at quantifying animal husbandry emissions and at understanding which factors can contribute in the control of those emissions have challenging measurement specifications as they typically need to monitor low variations around the ambient background concentrations for the gases of interest.
Other aspects that significantly impact their set of requirements for analytical instruments: they are often working in harsh field conditions, far from the laboratory standards, and they frequently need to setup their monitoring systems for extended period of time to capture the variations induced by the inherent seasonal activity of most farming practices.
Monitoring Needs
The most important gases to monitor when studying livestock emissions are NH3 (ammonia), CO2 (carbon dioxide), CH4 (methane), and N2O (nitrous oxide).
NH3 is largely produced in animal husbandries by the mixture of feces and urine.
CO2 and CH4 production occurs from normal respiration and digestion processes (ruminants), as well as from various biologicallyinduced degradation processes within the manure or the slurry.
Our Solution
It is a standard practice to characterize emission rates inside a control volume from a mass balance calculation for the gases of interest. In our case, the control volume is either a whole building or a dynamic flux chamber.
The Photoacoustic Gas Monitor INNOVA 1512 can monitor up to 5 different gases at trace concentration. Therefore, it is often possible to configure and calibrate the instrument for an additional specific compound to be used as tracer gas (typically SF6 - sulfur hexafluoride - or Freon R134a). The measurement method then consists of a controlled injection rate inside the husbandry building envelope with measurement at the ventilation inlets and outlets (up to 24 channels can be configured with the INNOVA 1409 multi-point sampler). The tracer gas monitoring is used to estimate the dilution effect from the ventilation on emission sources inside the building. One can then deduce the actual emission rates for the gases of interest.
When the use of dynamic flux chambers is preferred, the multi-point sampler enables the monitoring of multiple chambers in parallel.
The INNOVA 1512 can be configured with 5 optical filters. A good calibration procedure then enables measurement of 5 different gases: interferometric interferences are actively compensated within the sensing module to achieve low detection limit and measurement accuracy (see Table with a list of representative gases).
LumaSoft 7880 provides a user-friendly interface to the end-user who can easily set up the system, access the database, export the measurement logs into a spreadsheet format, and post-process them as needed.
Depending on the experimental setup, the monitor and sampler can either run as a standalone system or it can be remotely controlled by the LumaSoft 7880 software for full online monitoring.
Detection limits of typical gas of interest:
| Carbon dioxide | CO2 | 1.5 ppm |
| Methane | CH4 | 0.4 ppm |
| Nitrous oxide | N2O | 0.03 ppm |
| Ammonia | NH3 | 0.2 ppm |
|
Sulfur hexafluoride |
SF6 | 0.006 ppm |
Your Benefits
- Field deployable INNOVA 1512 monitor
- In-situ direct multi-gas monitoring
- Multi-channel (up to 24) sampling with INNOVA 1409
- Easy and convenient data export/processing from SQL Server database with LumaSoft 7880
- Stable, Reliable, no consumables, “zero” maintenance over long multi-month measurement period
References
It was already selected by multiple end-users who reported its use in a large variety of conditions over the planet: dairy cattle barn, poultry broiler houses, pig fattening installations, or even fish ponds.
Note: The INNOVA Photoacoustic Gas Monitor is also a valuable solution for commissioning or periodic efficiency testing on air purification equipment like ammonia scrubber.
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Key Products for this application
Typical setup used to monitor gas emission in husbandry buildings: A tracer gas is used to quantify the dilution effect of natural (or forced) ventilation on a gas source located in the building. Multi-point sampling is set on the inlets and outlets of the same control volume. Mass balance calculation with gas concentration values then leads to actual emission rates of pollutants of interest.
