Design and Application of a Nitrate Measurement System Based on a Narrowband Tunable Ultraviolet Light Source

The nitrate concentration in seawater is an important parameter for marine environment monitoring, which is of great significance for the analysis of seawater ecosystems. In this paper, a novel nitrate measurement system based on a narrowband tunable ultraviolet light source and support vector regression (SVR)-based algorithm is proposed and demonstrated. The system is composed of a tunable light source module, an optical fiber splitter, a temperature control module, a spectrometer and a data processing module. By controlling the motorized rotation stage and motorized filter wheel, a continuous and automatic narrowband tunable deep ultraviolet (DUV) light source module is developed. Different seawater samples from Aoshan Bay (Qingdao, China), the Western Pacific, Sanggou Bay (Weihai, China) and the South China Sea with nitrate concentrations of 0-
$102~\mu $
mol/L are measured by this system based on a narrowband tunable DUV light source and the results are compared with those of a broadband DUV light source system. The calculation model is established based on the SVR algorithm with/without temperature and salinity correction (TSC), and the prediction results are compared with those of the in situ ultraviolet spectrophotometry (ISUS) algorithm. The results show that the method based on a narrowband tunable light source system and the TSC-SVR algorithm has the best performance in predicting the nitrate concentration, where the root mean squared error (RMSE) decreased by 29.16% (from 1.20 to
$0.85~\mu $
mol/L) compared with the results of the broadband light source system, and the error range is from −3.01 to
$2.99~\mu $
mol/L. The proposed method in this paper has the potential to provide more accurate measurements in marine environment monitoring.