Soil and manure chambers

The Mazingira Centre is a full-service agricultural testing laboratory offering accurate and timely soil and manure chamber sampling to measure emissions. 

The technologies include: 

The static chamber method (non-flow-through non-steady-state gas flux chamber method), which is the basic method used to measure the GHG emissions from manure or soil. The fast-box chamber method with LGR and Licor deploys an ultra-portable gas analyzer of ABB-Los Gatos Research Inc. to retrieve a robust GHG dataset. 

 

 

1 Los Gatos Research (LGR) Analyzer (CH4 and N2O)LI-850 CO2 /H2O Gas Analyzer

To determine GHG fluxes of the entire manure heaps, large non-flow-through non-steady-state gas flux chambers were constructed. Each manure incubation chamber consisted of two parts, a bottom part made of concrete (inner dimensions 0.8 m *0.7 m *0.3 m) with a drainage at the center, and a headspace chamber constructed from a PVC box (0.9 m * 0.8 m * 0.8 m).

 

Gas chromatographsGas chromatograph with liquid injection autosamplerAutochambers LGR N2O/CH4 laser
4 gas chromatographs to measure CO2, CH4 and N2O concentration in air samples. Also used to measure biogas composition (CO2 and CH4)  from anaerobic biodigesters. Gas chromatograph to measure volatile fatty acids in liquid samples from biodigesters, manure storage, rumen fluid, and incubation bottles.18 automated soil-atmosphere flux chambers to measure GHG emissions from soils and deposited manure automatically.

Portable laser absorption spectrometer to measure N2O and CH4 emissions in the field.

    
LiCOR CO2 analyserPicarro G2508 laserManual GHG flux chambersManure chambers 
Portable infrared gas analyser to measure CO2 emissions in the field.Two laser absorption spectrometers to measure N2O/CH4/CO2/NH3/H2O from soils and deposited manure.>300 manual chambers for 
field GHG measurements 
from different land-use systems.		30 PVC chambers for 250 kg fresh manure to measure GHG emissions, leaching losses, fertilizer quality, and mass loss.