SBIR-STTR Award

Monitoring and quantifying wind erosion from agricultural and arid lands is important from a resource conservation and an air quality perspective. Current techniques rely on manual data collection are costly or are not commercially available or are a combination of all three. The project goal here is to demonstrate the feasibility of a low- cost device suitable for remote and/or harsh environments that provides real-time quantitative wind erosion data. Three existing proven techniques (passive sand/soil collection particle counts with an optical gate device and mass accumulation with a tipping bucket) will be merged into a single measuring “circuit.” The project will develop in steps beginning with an existing passive measurement device and incrementally adding and testing each adaptation in a laboratory setting to demonstrate feasibility. The project will culminate in a field test conducted in parallel with an established method. The proposed project will support the research priority of developing new technologies and methods for monitoring soil erosion by wind as defined in the USDA topic area 8.4: Conservation of Natural Resources. This research area has been confirmed as a priority need by the National Wind Erosion Research Network where the lack of affordable wind erosion instruments has been identified as a barrier to full-scale source characterization. Therefore our proposed instrument has a market and also meets a critical need. The project narrative outlines how the funds from the SBIR grant USDA- NIFA-SBIR-006790 would be used to develop a prototype within eight months to expedite this technology to market.