Development of Novel Handheld Sugar Measuring Sensor to Monitor Production of Sugar Beet Crops

The sugar beet is the most economically important among the beet family. Sugar yield is the highest importance to sugar beet growers. Currently, growers do not have a means to estimate sucrose content during the season in their sugar beet fields. Sucrose determinations happen at the factory upon receipt of the beets after harvest and the grower has no means to alter their management practises during the season to maximize sucrose yield or to estimate their payment from delivered beets. Develop a handheld miniature spectrometer capable of measuring sucrose content in cut pieces and whole sugar beets. The proposed spectrometer is based on acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF) technology. An AOTF is an all solid-state tunable filter with no moving parts and is therefore immune to orientation changes or even severe mechanical shock and vibrations, making it ideal for operation in harsh industrial environments. Moreover, the AOTF is a high throughput and high-speed programmable device capable of randomly accessing thousands of precise wavelengths in less than a second, making it an excellent tool for in-situ NIR spectroscopy. In the USA, sugar beet is grown on 1.3 million acres annually by over 10,000 growers in 15 states, with a farm gate value of over 900 million dollars. Ultimately, the grower group represents the largest target market for improved sucrose detection instrumentation.