I am working on the determination of soil organic matter by LOI (loss on ignition). I have been using different ignition temperature and time to estimate organic matter. How to identify the organic matter decomposed completely after ignition? Compared with other method or some others?
Dear Andreas, thank you so much for your answer.
I have used the Furnace Systems with Scale and Software for Determination of Combustion Loss to determine the organic matter. Its operating principle is familiar with TGA. I found that it is very hard to command the ignition temperature and time for different samples. I am trying to find the optimal choice for ignition temperature and time. Would you please tell me the heating rate of TGA in determining organic matter and the detail operation procedure?
Hope for your reply.
Thank you so much.
As Andreas already stated, LOI is not state of the art in determining carbon contents of soils. Elemental analysers are the method of choice, even if it also has some rawbacks in determining OC while inorganic carbon is present in the sample.
Interesting publications for you might be Bisutti et al 2007 and Vuong et al. 2013
You will find there heaps of references for further reading.
Article Simultaneous measurement of soil organic and inorganic carbo...
Article Determination of total organic carbon - An overview of current methods