Hello everyone,
As title states, I am currently working on a project which requires measurements of Iron concentration within soil material. The procedure itself is quite complex, but calculations/conversions between units is even more so.
My question is (apologies in advance for the long post!!):
I have got soil samples with an average water content of 9%. 30g of that sample is mixed with 30g of water in a serum bottle and left for incubation. Samples of that are taken regularly (0.5g of slurry) and mixed with 4.5mL of HCl. An aliquot (100uL) of that mixture is taken and mixed with 1mL of a reagent. Absorbance is then measured, which, after a calculation (which I am fairly happy with so no point going into detail) gives me the concentration of Iron in that sample in umol/g WET weight. Point is, now I need to convert that concentration into umol/g DRY weight.
For example, lets say I have got a concentration of 9umol/g WET weight of Iron (II). Would it make sense to calculate how much Iron there is in the serum bottle in total (30g soil+30g water), which should be 270umol, then calculate the dry weight of the soil in total (30g of soil with 9% water content=27.3g of DRY soil) AND then divide former by latter? By doing that I am dividing the nM concentration per serum bottle in liquid phase by dry weight of soil per bottle, which should technically give me the concentration in nM per g DRY weight?
..I don't even know if that makes sense. Lets see.. Any help is welcome and highly appreciated!!
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