ESEL Paper Review_20110420 by Aamir Alaud-din

1.    Title and Author

Title: 2011_05_03_PARAFAC modeling of fluorescence excitation emission spectra for rapid assessment of compost maturity
 
Authors: Guang-Hui Yu, Yi-Hong Luo, Min-Jie Wu, Zhu Tang, Dong-Yang Liu, Xing-Ming Yang, Qi-Rong Shen*

Jiangsu Key Lab for Organic Solid Waste Utilization, College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, PR China

2.    Summary of Paper

The livestock production has increased the need of treatment of waste streams in order to preserve the nutrients to introduce them back to soil. Compost is need for this purpose. To check the maturity of compost, PARAFAC modeling was carried out. Different compost products were collected from 9 provinces of China. Fluorescence excitation emission spectra were obtained. Chemical analysis for DOC, TN, C, N, and OCC. Statistical analysis was carried out on SPSS.

Fluorescence excitation emission spectra were obtained. The results of this analysis are summarized below.

Compost Maturity    No. of Peaks    Ex/Em
Mature    2    230/420
330/420
Immature    4    220/340
280/340
220/410
330/410

Mature compost was found to contain humic acid-like substances (i.e., Ex/Em = 330/420) and fulvic acid-like substances (i.e., Ex/Em = 230/420). Immature compost had two additional peaks of tryptophan-like substances (i.e., Ex/Em = 220/340) and microbial byproduct-like substances (i.e., Ex/Em = 280/340).
No correlation was found between scores of PARAFAC components and values for C/N ratio, TOC/TN ratio and MI. A poor correlation was found between three indices and others detected in this study. So, it was concluded that C/N ratio, TOC/TN ratio, and MI are not suitable indices to determine compost maturity.

3.    Contribution to ESEL

PARAFAC modeling was first used in chemometrics. After, it was used in DOM determination in water bodies. Recently, it is used to determine the maturity of compost which is industrial product. So, a single technique may be useful to analyze a lot of substances.

By: Aamir Alaud-din
aamiralauddin@gist.ac.kr