Influence of pretreatment method on the result of mineralogical analysis for low mass dust aerosol samples

The objective of this research was to discuss the influence of pretreatment on the result of mineralogical analysis for low mass dust aerosol samples. Three dust aerosol samples were collected at Dunhuang during three dust storm events in spring, 2002. Each sample was operated by the pretreatment method and X-ray diffraction experiment for five times. The results show that little variation was observed for eight major minerals content among the five experiments, and the standard deviations for most minerals are also relatively low compared with their average values. The relative standard deviations were also calculated, which showed that major components of quartz, plagioclase, illite, kaolinite, chlorite, and calcite had the lower variability (less than 10%) while the small quantities minerals of potassium feldspar and dolomite had high variability (up to 10%). The results proved that this pretreatment method did not influence mineralogical analysis result for low mass aerosol samples.