Development of a rapid moisture content method for compost materials

One of the most important design and operating parameters at composting facilities is moisture content. Existing standard gravimetric oven methods required a minimum of 19 hours to complete. In this study, by reducing the amount of sample, the time required to complete a standard gravimetric oven method was reduced to nine hours. A new infrared moisture balance method was also developed that reduced the analysis time to 33 minutes. The new infrared method, however, requires one apparatus for each result. The relative precision of the new infrared method was compared to two standard methods using five different materials: straw, celery, paper industry biosolids, municipal biosolids, and cured municipal compost. The new infrared method gave equivalent accuracy on all the materials tested, except for the low moisture content (five percent) material (straw).