IDEA

A scientific instrument for measuring 'Random Reflectance' (Ro) of Biochar to determine it's half life as another metric for the Carbon Removal Marketplace (CRM) biochar valuation (eg. Longer half life = higher financial value) and modelling future global Carbon Removal...very handy for climate scientists.  The CharLife could be CRM platform agnostic aka used for any CRM platform around the world! It could be made a standard instrument for valuing the biochar commodity itself👍
Measurement and Reporting would be determined by the hardware/software system but the Verification could be platform specific with integration or I/anyone(?) could come up with a standard that the majority of platforms agree upon.

Instrument design

• cheap, handheld, light and portable using a widely available OTS instrument
  - pocket microscope with smartphone digiscoping eg. Carson 'Microflip' for light microscopy (functional groups, eg. Si, found in phytoliths BUT not what is mainly being measured, if at all aka Ro of Carbon structures seem, according to perplexity, the main source of Ro BUT I'm unsure how it could be disentangled from Silicon reflectance eg. Different Ro wavelengths)
• could the wavelengths be determined from a high resolution image captured by the Carson microflip/smartphone camera...the rest could be done at the backend possibly using a combo of ML and lab equipment which needs to be investigated
• even the preparation of the sample can be done at the user end
• ?IR spectroscopy (twin peaks)
• C:H ratio (possibly obsolete)
• other

Problem

• maybe Biochar samples need to be physically sent to a lab?

Solution

• basically, a data pipeline...
• Biochar samples (3)->sample preparation->pocket microscope->smartphone camera (in app)->image capture->cloud->lab->NIR/IR spectroscopy/other->ML Ro calculation->Biochar half life result in app at user end

KEY IT

• smartphone app
• data engineering
• cloud computing
• databases
• big data
• AI/ML

KEY HARDWARE

• Digiscope (light)
• smartphone (camera)
• lab instrumentation (eg. NIR/IR)

AI additional information

1. Edge AI on Digiscope?
   - by not adding AI software to the instrument the cost can be reduced
2. Edge AI on app?
   • could power the digiscoping smartphone app using computer vision that has an offline database for offline use that uploads annotated data from the user and downloads other users annotated data when the phone is online
3. AI at the backend?

• done in a lab

Anyone interested, please get in touch on the 'Contact' form and we can have a discussion about the project!