A Combined Soil-Moisture and Light Probe for Field Agriculture
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: A design is presented for a push-in field probe that measures volumetric water content by capacitive sensing of soil dielectric permittivity at 70 MHz (Topp equation as the adopted calibration), soil temperature, and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR, 400-700 nm) at an above-ground head. The calculated performance budget, produced by the accompanying computation script, gives a volumetric water content resolution of 0.0023 m3/m3 at an apparent permittivity of 15, a combined mid-range accuracy of 0.0339 m3/m3 dominated by soil-specific calibration, a PAR resolution of 0.12 umol m-2 s-1 with a daily-integrated cosine error of -3.51%, and a season energy use of 0.615 Wh at a 900 s sampling interval over 180 days. SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED: no hardware was built or tested.
Author: Aldred, William Alexander
Language: English
Subfield: Geophysics
Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225760417
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