Rapid determination of ammonia nitrogen concentration in biogas slurry based on NIR transmission spectroscopy with characteristic wavelength selection

Abstract

As an important intermediate product of the anaerobic digestion (AD) process, ammonia nitrogen (AN) is an essential indicator for analyzing the nitrogen nutrition level in the biogas system. To realize rapid evaluation of ammonia nitrogen concentration (ANC) in biogas slurry during AD, a detection model of ANC was established by combining near infrared (NIR) transmission spectroscopy with partial least squares. The CARS-GSA was constructed based on the competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) algorithm combined with the genetic simulated annealing algorithm (GSA), which was applied to characteristic wavelength selection of AN for improving the accuracy and efficiency of the spectral detection model. Through the selection of wavelengths by CARS-GSA, the modeling wavelengths decreased to 47 from 1557 of raw spectra, and the performance of the ANC regression model was effectively improved. For the CARS-GSA model, the determination coefficient, root mean squared error and residual predictive deviation of the validation set were 0.989, 12.549 and 9.662, respectively. For the independent test set, the above indexes were 0.990, 21.341 and 9.821, and consistent with those of the calibration set. The results showed that CARS-GSA could effectively reduce modeling wavelength variables and enhance prediction ability of the model. This study provides a theoretical support for the application of NIR transmission spectroscopy in online detection of ANC in biogas slurry.