Design and Development of a Portable Soil Electrical Conductivity Detector

Design and development of a soil electrical conductivity measuring unit is the aim of this study. Iran is one of the most popular countries in the Middle East and the huge amount of population needs a great deal of food. Some problems of Iran agriculture were discussed in the study. Iran has saline soil, dry climate and high climate variation in different regions. For these reasons, agriculture in Iran must be able to produce food not only for Iranian people but also for the other people of the world enabling native farmers to compete with foreign farmers. For having a sustainable agriculture it is needed to know the soil characteristics, shortages and abilities. Soil electrical conductivity was used for field scale application for measuring soil salinity, cation exchange capacity, soil water content and soil temperature. A portable soil Electrical Conductivity (EC) detector was designed and developed. The EC detector adopts a four-electrode method and consists of these parts: four disks as electrodes, a power source, a function generator and the data acquisition unit. Two electrodes inject a constant electrical current into the soil and the voltage drop detects between two other electrodes. The power and recorder units consist of several sections including the power source, the function generator, the A/D conversion section, the display section, and the data acquisition section. The detector is useful for field scale survey and does so fast soil electrical conductivity measurements of the field