FOSS supplies a complete range of water and soil analysis systems that offer a unique degree of application flexibility. Partially to fully automated systems can be tailored exactly to your analyte range, workload and budget while maintaining the potential of expanding as your lab grows.

To maintain the growth cycle and the soil it is necessary to perform rapid and simple soil and fertilizer analyses taken from the land. It calls for analysis of pH, nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, phosphorus, potassium and trace metals.

Traditional analysis based on manual wet chemistry is labour-intensive, tedious and time-consuming. However, for today’s busy laboratory, automated testing systems that generate rapid and well-documented results are essential for quality environmental management.

Today our resources are under constant stress from industrial development and population growth, so it is vital to reliably monitor the quality of our environment for present and future generations.

The growth of plants in the environment depends upon the availability of mineral nutrients present in water. These naturally occurring nutrients in soil are taken up by the growing plant and are retained in the plant. The growth of plants in agriculture requires addition of further minerals in the form of fertilizers. The plants will yield grains or legumes and are used to feed man and livestock. Decomposed animals once again enrich the soil with organic nitrogen. Thus the cycle goes on and on.

Following the natural water cycle, waters can be classified according to their source:

1. Surface waters: With the exception of the sea, surface waters can be regarded as a mixture of ground, spring, rain and waste waters. They represent the most important biotope for an extreme variety of life on earth and are important as drinking water supply, but also as drainage channels for disposal of wastes.
2. Precipitation waters include rain, fog, frost, mist, hail, snow and glacier water. One is tempted to think of them as very clean waters, but remembering that 1 litre of rain washes some 330,000 litre of air, one can imagine that precipitates are not usually potable; they are merely the waste waters of the air.
3. Groundwater include drilled wells, bank filtered sources, springs and mineral waters. Parameters measured include pH and temperature, bacteriological status, contamination indicators like ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, chloride and phosphate and corrosional parameters like iron, manganese, sulphate and sulphide.
4. Waste water. Domestic waters are considerably polluted, mainly by organic pollutants. Waste waters from industry and trade, on the other hand, can contain almost anything in any concentration. Industries like breweries, distilleries, dairies, slaughterhouses, paper and pulp mills, sugar refineries and other food processing plants produce mainly organic pollutants. The chemical and metal processing industries, however, often have waste waters with toxic pollutants which cannot be processed together with domestic wastes, unless a certain pre-treatment is done.

Waters can also be classified according to their usage and quality; Drinking water for direct human use, water of drinking water quality for the food industry, waters of not drinking quality, for example process water and industrial water, and distilled waters for laboratories and pharmaceutical and chemical industries.

Please use the Product guide to find the right solution for your exact needs.