I am trying to recover aluminum from water treatment sludge using acidification process.
I submitted 3g of raw sludge sample to X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) analysis and found out that the aluminum content in the raw sludge is 16.3%.
And then I submitted the supernatant after acidification for Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES) analysis and found out that the aluminum content in the supernatant is 61940ppm / 6.194%.
So does the recovery efficiency is calculated by dividing the aluminum content in the supernatant with the raw sludge sample? Just in case it is required, the amount of supernatant is 20ml and the results have been attached. Thank you all for your time.
Theoretically, the recovery efficiency of aluminum is calculated by dividing the amount of Al in the supernatant with the Al contained in the raw sludge.
Hi, I noticed your ICP result was reported as ppm only without further stating it is mg/L or mg/kg. Your XRF result was reported as weight % of each element in your sample so if you want to calculate your % of recovery you need to standardize everything as weight % or volume %.
Aliquot concentration of your sample analyzed by ICP will be determined as mg/L and in order to convert it to final concentration of element you need to multiply the concentration you get from ICP with your liquid volume and divide with amount of your sample used.
Conc. (mg/kg) = Alq conc. (mg/L) * Volume (ml) / Sample amount (g or ml)
In this case example, if the 6 ppm is 6 mg/L,
Conc. (mg/kg) = [6 mg/L * 20ml] / Sample amount (g)
After you get the final concentration of the element in weight %, now you can divide the concentration obtained using ICP with the concentration obtained from XRF as they share the same unit and you get the recovery efficiency.
Though XRF are far less accurate compare to ICP, I would suggest you solely use ICP or AAS to analyze your sample to get the most accurate reading, instead of comparing the result from XRF with ICP.
Thank you Wendong Wang and Ooi Yan Jie for answering my question, especially to Ooi Yan Jie for the detailed explaination, it is very useful. Thank you very much.
For your information, I did submitted my raw sludge sample for ICP-OES analysis. However, the Al concentration obtained from the analysis is way lower than the concentration obtained from the supernatant, maybe due to some error during the analysis. That is why I choose to attached the XRF result instead of the ICP-OES as I was worried that it may cause confusion.
And just in case you want to know, the concentration obtained from ICP-OES for the raw sludge is 1.349 ppm with a dilution factor of x1000 while the concentration for the supernatant is 6.194 ppm with a dilution factor of x10000.
Once again, thank you both for answering my question, the information I obtained from you all are very useful. Thank you very much.
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