Monitoring of the degradation dynamics of agricultural films by IR thermography

The high consumption of plastic materials for use in agriculture is generating serious problems regarding environmental impact. Biodegradable materials are at present the only solution to this type of problems. Research in material science is daily proposing different materials with this requirement for application in various sectors. One of the problems is to analyse the degradation states of the films before their application in order to know the time and the modality of degradation. Here we propose a novel method based on thermography vs time which allows the degradation dynamics of agricultural films to be evaluated. In our experiment we put some biodegradable materials of our interest on soil in an open field. The main characteristic of these materials is that they are originally liquid and they are sprayed on soil and immediately cross-link into a film state. Through an IR thermal camera we monitored the state of the films day by day and analysed the thermal images in order to detect the continuous changing of their physical properties.