Water and soil
FOSS supplies a complete
range of water and soil analysis systems that offer a unique degree of
application flexibility. Partially to fully automated systems can be tailored
exactly to your analyte range, workload and budget while maintaining the
potential of expanding as your lab grows.
To maintain the growth cycle
and the soil it is necessary to perform rapid and simple soil and fertilizer
analyses taken from the land. It calls for analysis of pH, nitrate, nitrite,
ammonia, phosphorus, potassium and trace metals.
Traditional analysis based on
manual wet chemistry is labour-intensive, tedious and time-consuming. However,
for today’s busy laboratory, automated testing systems that generate rapid and
well-documented results are essential for quality environmental management.
Today our resources are under
constant stress from industrial development and population growth, so it is
vital to reliably monitor the quality of our environment for present and future
generations.
The growth of plants in the
environment depends upon the availability of mineral nutrients present in water.
These naturally occurring nutrients in soil are taken up by the growing plant
and are retained in the plant. The growth of plants in agriculture requires
addition of further minerals in the form of fertilizers. The plants will yield
grains or legumes and are used to feed man and livestock. Decomposed animals
once again enrich the soil with organic nitrogen. Thus the cycle goes on and on.
Following the natural water
cycle, waters can be classified according to their source:
1. Surface
waters:
With the exception of the sea, surface waters can be regarded as a mixture of
ground, spring, rain and waste waters. They represent the most important biotope
for an extreme variety of life on earth and are important as drinking water
supply, but also as drainage channels for disposal of wastes.
2. Precipitation waters
include rain, fog, frost, mist, hail, snow and glacier water. One is tempted to
think of them as very clean waters, but remembering that 1 litre of rain washes
some 330,000 litre of air, one can imagine that precipitates are not usually
potable; they are merely the waste waters of the air.
3. Groundwater
include drilled wells, bank filtered sources, springs and mineral
waters. Parameters measured include pH and temperature, bacteriological status,
contamination indicators like ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, chloride and phosphate
and corrosional parameters like iron, manganese, sulphate and sulphide.
4. Waste
water.
Domestic waters are considerably polluted, mainly by organic pollutants. Waste
waters from industry and trade, on the other hand, can contain almost anything
in any concentration. Industries like breweries, distilleries, dairies,
slaughterhouses, paper and pulp mills, sugar refineries and other food
processing plants produce mainly organic pollutants. The chemical and metal
processing industries, however, often have waste waters with toxic pollutants
which cannot be processed together with domestic wastes, unless a certain
pre-treatment is done.
Waters can also be classified
according to their usage and quality; Drinking water for direct human use, water
of drinking water quality for the food industry, waters of not drinking quality,
for example process water and industrial water, and distilled waters for
laboratories and pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
