Feeding the World
Studying plants to improve crop performance and yield. The global population is growing and current crop yield is not keeping up with this pace of growth.
Today, researchers are very interested in studying and better understanding the photosynthetic process to find ways to make crops more efficient under changing ambient conditions and to improve crop yield. Climate change and increasing ambient CO2 levels have had a major impact on the photosynthetic process in plants. All plants use sunlight, CO2 and water to make photosynthesis.
Researchers of PP Systems are using instrumentation like the CIRAS-3 Portable Photosynthesis System to study how plants photosynthesize under various environmental conditions (CO2, H2O, temperature and light) in-situ. For high level research, it is imperative that researchers can both measure and control CO2 and H2O quickly and accurately. Pyroelectric detectors from InfraTec allow our CIRAS-3 Portable Photosynthesis System to do both. The CIRAS-3 is considered a “true differential” analyser featuring four independent, non-dispersive infrared gas analysers for both CO2 and H2O. This allows researchers to precisely control the reference supply of CO2 and H2O gas concentrations provided to the leaf and measure the sample CO2 and H2O gas concentrations coming from the leaf.
“We’ve been using InfraTec detectors for 10+ years and have been quite pleased with the performance. They are accurate, robust and extremely reliable which is critical in our business and with our gas analysis range of products.”
Instruments like this are being used by universities, government research institutes and private research companies all around the world and data is published regularly in many premier scientific publications. Ultimately, this important research results in educating farmers and providing them with the tools and resources necessary to improve crop performance and yield under these challenging times and rapidly evolving changes to our planet.
Use of Pyroelectric Detectors in Practice
One advantage of pyroelectric detectors is the versatility of their applications. Detecting and analyzing gases and gas mixtures, investigating the material composition of organic and inorganic compounds, monitoring flames – all this is of great importance in a wide range of industries. Selected examples will help you to get to know some of the possible applications and, at best, to gain valuable ideas for solving your own measurement and testing tasks.