I will be performing a pot experiment where I will be artificially inducing heavy metal stress to my plants.
How will I prepare a solution of known ppm of heavy metals (Cr and Ni) to add it to the pot of 10 kg soil?
First of all; ppm should not be used anymore (for decades already)!
Express content in mg/kg or mg/l is the way to do it.
I am not an expert in pot experiments, so I wonder whether applying it via the water is the most logical way. Also you will probably not apply it once, so the minerals can either accumulate in the soil (e.g. by binding to soil constituents) or if you add clear water, it might be washed out. So the chemical form of the metal might be of importance as well.
Anyway: assuming that the soil weight is 10 kg, and the amount of water 1 l, then the most important thing to know is the salt you are going to use and whether or not it does contain any crystal water. That will give you the total molecular weight and you can then calculate the percentage of the salt being the metal involved. This percentage and the intended metal concentration in mg/l will give you the mg of salt you have to use to get the intended concentration. Check this after preparation after the solution by an appropriate analytical method, as this is essential in good analytical and science practice!
For the preparation of ppm solution of any known metal, you should select an analytical grade compound containing the metal of interest and divide its molecular weight by the molecular weight of metal e g, to prepare Fe ppm solution you can select FeSo4 and divide the molecular weight of this compound by molecular weight of Fe. The figure you get, dissolve this amount in gram per litre. This will be 1000ppm solution of iron. In this way, you can prepare the ppm solution of considered metals
Thankyou C.A. (Kees) Kan Sir and Muhammad Amjad Sir for your valuable suggestions.
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