Beschrijving
Nitrogen deposition resulting from ammonia emissions negatively affects biodiversity. The agricultural sector, including livestock housing, is the biggest contributor to ammonia emissions. The diversity in livestock housing systems across Europe is enormous. Furthermore, the farmers’ management has a high impact on the amount of ammonia coming out of the livestock house. Emission measurements are important to estimate the actual impact of livestock houses on protected nature habitats nearby the livestock house. Moreover, continuous emission measurements could assist the farmer to apply emission reducing management strategies.Currently, the number of livestock houses equipped with an emission measuring system are very limited, due to the high costs related to the equipment needed to enable this. Therefore, the increasing availability of low cost ammonia sensors, measuring ammonia emissions of barns, i.e. emission monitoring, is becoming more feasible.
Most of the low cost ammonia sensors available on the market were not developed with the objective to apply them in a barn environment. This harsh environment can possibly affect the performance of ammonia sensors in several ways. In this study, a short time exposure test in barns was performed. Seven different low cost sensors were tested in duplicate in a pig-, a dairy- and a poultry barn. Based on their measuring principle, the sensors can be divided in 2 groups: (1) electrochemical, and (2) laser based sensors. The sensors were calibrated by offering a range of known NH3-concentrations prior to the barn measurements
The measured ammonia concentrations in each barn environment by the low cost sensors will be compared with measurements using a reference analyser, i.e. a PICARRO Cavity Ring-Down Spectrometer G2508 (Picarro Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA). Moreover, the differences between the duplicate measurements for each sensor will be discussed as well as the requirement of a preceding lab calibration.
Acknowledgements: Flanders Government (Environmental Department) for their financial support. The technical team including Lorenzo Plant, Willem Grauls and Stan Roelens for the practical implementation of the experiment.
| Periode | 25-sep.-2024 |
|---|---|
| Titel evenement | Emili Conference 2024: International Symposium on Gas and Dust Emissions from Livestock |
| Soort evenement | Congres |
| Congresnummer | 5th edition |
| Locatie | Valencia, SpanjeTonen op kaart |
| Mate van erkenning | Internationaal |