Determination of water content in corn stover silage using near-infrared spectroscopy

Maoqun Zhang,Xuefen Zhang,Xiaofeng Xu,Chao Zhao,Muhammad Hassan,Zidong Yang,Qianjun Shao

doi:10.25165/j.ijabe.20191206.4914

Abstract

The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of utilizing near-infrared spectroscopy to determine the water content of corn stover silage across a wide range. The water contents of 208 samples were measured, and their corresponding near-infrared spectra were simultaneously collected. The effects of different preprocessing methods, such as derivation, standard normal variety (SNV), multiplicative scatter correction (MSC), and non-preprocessing methods for the obtained near-infrared spectra on the performance of calibration models were compared. The calibration models were established by modified partial least squares (MPLS) regression. The results showed that the calibration model developed from the successive preprocessing of MSC and first-order derivation (1-D) achieved the optimal performance. The correlation coefficients of the calibration and validation subset were 0.974 and 0.949, respectively, and the standard errors of the calibration and cross validation were 4.249% and 4.256%, respectively. External validation was performed on 60 samples. The correlation coefficient between the measured and predicted values of the calibration model was 0.973 and the prediction model’s relative percent deviation was 4.317. This indicated that the mathematical model of near-infrared spectroscopy predicted the water content in corn stover silage with high accuracy. The study showed that the near-infrared spectroscopy technology can be used for rapid and non-destructive testing across a wide range of water contents in the corn stover silage. Keywords: near-infrared spectroscopy, water, non-destructive measurement, corn stover silage DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20191206.4914 Citation: Zhang M Q, Zhao C, Shao Q J, Yang Z D, Zhang X F, Xu X F, et al. Determination of water content in corn stover silage using near-infrared spectroscopy. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2019; 12(6): 143–148.

Highlights

Corn (Zea mays L.) is one of the high and stable-yield crops in the world, and corn stover is one of the three major agricultural residues in China which accounts for 36.81% of China’s total straw production[1,2]
Liu et al reported that the water content of corn stover ranged from 3.15% to 6.75%[22], while Huang et al reported the water content of wheat/rice straw to range from 5.13% to 20.44%[21] and the water content of soybean was predicted to range from 6.92% to 13.71%[9]
Water uptake while barley steeping was monitored the by near-infrared spectroscopy over a large scale range of water content (28.5%-97.9%)[29]

Summary

Introduction

Corn (Zea mays L.) is one of the high and stable-yield crops in the world, and corn stover is one of the three major agricultural residues in China which accounts for 36.81% of China’s total straw production[1,2]. Many dairy farms adopt the corn stover silage to raise cows, so as to ensure the stable quality of roughage in the diet structure and improve the milk yield. The ensiling of fresh corn stover is an attractive raw material for forage production due to its high content of carbohydrates and easy degradability. The water content of the corn stover silage is the most fundamental and important parameter[5,6]. It is very important to realize the fast determination of water content, and adjusting it for better forage quality. Research on rapid and non-destructive testing of water content in corn stover silage could improve the detection efficiency, reduce the analysis cost, provide an efficient analysis platform, and information on straw utilization[9,10]

Objectives

Methods

Results