Soil Clay Mineralogical Phase Analysis of Ganges Floodplain Soils by XRD and XRF

Abstract

Soil minerals study is vital in terms of investigating the major soil forming compounds and to find out the fate of minor and trace elements in soils. It is also essential for the soil-plant interaction purpose. To identify soil mineral phases especially clay minerals, X-ray diffraction (XRD) has been a popular technique. The clay mineralogical information of soils in Bangladesh is limited, especially in Ganges flood plain region (Agro Ecological Zone (AEZ) 12 and 13). Therefore, to overcome this limitation, in this study, we performed XRD analysis of <2 mm fractions soil samples of AEX 12 and 13. However, identifying mineralogical phases by XRD in <2 mm fractions soils is not so straight-forward due to many practical problems. We fully matched only two mineralogical phases in all the soil samples which is quartz and potassium-Aluminum-Silicate. However, the full XRD peaks indicate that more minerals are also present, but due to heterogeneity of soils samples, it is difficult to find other minerals phases by only XRD peak of <2 mm fractions. Therefore, to find more information about mineralogical phases, we performed XRF analysis that provides the elemental composition of minerals phase as oxide. XRF analysis indicated the presence of secondary minerals like illite and chlorite. The presence of high percentage Fe oxide not only indicated the iron mineral phase (goethite and ferrihydrite) but also indicated iron rich high charge smectite minerals (beidellite). The presence of iron rich smectite minerals in the Ganges sediments reported in several previous studies. Thus, we concluded that only XRD in <2 mm fractions of soils is not adequate to identify the mineralogical phases of soil samples. Others analyses like XRF, XRD in <2 μm fractions will be necessary to locate an entire image of soil mineralogical phases.