PHOTO: RENÉ KOERHUIS
PHOTO: NANONORD
NUTRIENT ANAL ▶▶▶YSIS
The Tveskaeg Benchtop NMR sensor on the Samson Agro stand at Agri technica 2019. At the bottom, you can see the small connection (12.5 mm) through which every slurry sample must flow.
30 minutes. The next step in the development, which is currently being taken, is to develop a mobile version for Samson slurry tankers that takes less time to determine the contents of slurry.
Faster yet still reliable In order to determine the contents of slurry, it must flow through the magnet of the NMR sensor. To achieve this, a slurry sample is taken from the tank and sent through the NMR sen- sor. In order to keep the sensor affordable, comparable to the current price of a NIR sen- sor, a 30 cm magnet with an internal diameter of 12.5 mm was chosen. “The price increases exponentially with a larger magnet diameter,” says Jensen. “At the same time, the accuracy decreases quadratically when you reduce the
This is the 7 kg electromagnet of NanoNord’s NMR sensor that reso- nates atomic nuclei so that they orientate themselves in a certain direction.
cycle time because you introduce more noise. We are currently working with a cycle time of 5 minutes and the ultimate goal is a cycle time of 3 minutes,” explains Jensen.
NanoNord and Samson compared the accura- cy of 132 measurements of ammonium (NH4-N) with the Tveskaeg sensor (cycle time of 5 minutes) with lab measurements from the Danish Agrolab. A total of 95% of the Tveskaeg measurements deviated by a maximum of 10% from the lab measurements, while the ac- curacy of all measurements deviated by a max- imum of 25%. The measurements are done in ‘parts per million’ (ppm) and Jensen indicates that currently in 95% of the cases, the meas- ured amount of nitrogen deviates a few hun- dred ppm (slurry commonly contains 700 to
From Bluetooth to slurry
NanoNord founder Ole Jensen claims he in- vented the Bluetooth technology for his company Digianswer, a developer of digital answer phones, more than 20 years ago. He sold this company to Motorola in 1999. Blue- tooth is named after King Harald I (Blue- tooth) of Denmark. The Bluetooth logo
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stands for the initials H and B from the rune script. A son of Harald -- also a king -- was called Svend Tveskaeg (Sweyn Forkbeard) and NanoNord’s NMR sensor is symbolically named after him. Compare the Bluetooth logo with the logo of the Tveskaeg sensor to see how much they resemble each other…
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 22 May 2020
4,000 ppm N) with a cycle time of 3 minutes. For P-total, it is a 100 ppm deviation from 200 to 2,000 ppm P-total in slurry. “With PO4, phos- phate, the accuracy is already as good as 10 to 20 ppm,” says Jensen. At the same time, he notes that reliable determination of the pot- assium content currently takes more than 3 minutes.
Compared to current NIR technology, the NMR technology developed by NanoNord and Sam- son still has the disadvantage that it can only analyse a small amount of slurry and that it re- quires a few minutes to analyse and determine the contents compared to the continuous re- al-time measurements of NIR sensors. The number of calibration curves per NIR sensor supplier and thus the reliability is constantly increasing. An NMR sensor is calibrated once by the manufacturer and that is sufficient. NMR’s biggest trump card – no calibration curves required and therefore greater accuracy – must prove itself in practice. Ole Jensen: “I prefer one reliable measurement to thou- sands of unreliable measurements...”
Samson Agro plans to test prototypes in the next two seasons and to commercialise its SlurryLab technology from 2022 onwards.
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