Moisture content of grain is one of the important parameters always considered when deciding the quality and price of grain, at the stage of harvesting, storage, processing and marketing. Grain having excess moisture content, if stored for long duration, will spoil due to insect/fungus infestation. Portable, field usable, and easy-to-use direct moisture (%) display Grain Moisture Meter is a nec...

Water balance considerations at the soil surface lead to an equation that relates the autocorrelation of soil moisture in climate models to 1) seasonality in the statistics of the atmospheric forcing, 2) the variation of evaporation with soil moisture, 3) the variation of runoff with soil moisture, and 4) correlation between the atmospheric forcing and antecedent soil moisture, as perhaps induc...

BACKGROUND Understanding the relationship between environment and genetics requires the integration of knowledge on the demographic behavior of natural populations. However, the demographic performance and genetic composition of Arabidopsis thaliana populations in the species' native environments remain largely uncharacterized. This information, in combination with the advances on the study of ...

Differing from the structure of traditional parallel plate capacitive sensor a semi cylindrical capacitive sensor has been introduced in this present work to measure the soil moisture conveniently. Here, the numerical analysis method to evaluate the capacitance from the semi-cylindrical capacitive sensor is analyzed and discussed. The changes of capacitance with the variation of soil moisture o...

The moisture content of biomass affects its processing for applications such as electricity or steam. In this study, the effects of variation in moisture content of banagrass and energycane was evaluated using techno-economic analysis and life-cycle assessments. A 25% loss of moisture was assumed as a variation that was achieved by field drying the biomass. Techno-economic analysis revealed tha...

Spaceborne scatterometers and radiometers offer soil moisture information with resolutions in the order of a few tens of kilometres. However, hydrologic users often request a resolution in the order of 1 km. Based on the insight that surface soil moisture in part is driven by large scale atmospheric forcing, a temporal analysis was carried out between backscatter on a local (1 km) and a regiona...

[1] The radar backscattering coefficient is mainly determined by surface soil moisture, vegetation and land surface roughness under a given configuration of the satellite sensor. It is observed that the temporal variations of the three variables are different, the variation of vegetation and roughness are at the longer temporal scales corresponding to climate and cultivation practices, while so...

The drying behavior of green peas is investigated in a pilot scaled Fluidized Bed Dryer (FBD) with inert particles assisted by an Infra Red (IR) heat source. The variation of shrinkage and moisture diffusivity with temperature and moisture content were investigated. The experimental drying curves were adjusted to the diffusion model of Fick’s law for spherical particles. The result was that...

Ecologists have long classified Midwestern prairies based on compositional variation assumed to reflect local gradients in moisture availability. The best known classification is based on Curtis' continuum index (CI), calculated using the presence of indicator species thought centered on different portions of an underlying moisture gradient. Direct evidence of the extent to which CI reflects di...