Soil minerals study is vital in terms of in vestigate the major soil forming compounds and to find out
the fate of minor and trace elements,essential for the soil–plant interaction purpose.X-raydiffraction
(XRD) has been a popular technique to search out the phases for different types of samples.For the soil
samples,however,employing XRD is not so straight for ward due to many practical problems.In the
current approach, principal component analysis(PCA)has been used to have an idea of the minerals
present,in qualitative manner,in the soil under study.PCA was used on the elemental concentrations
data of 17 elements,determined by the energy dispersive
X-ray fluorescence(EDXRF)technique.XRD
analysis of soil samples has been do nealso to identify the minerals of major elements.Someprior
treatments,like removal of silicaby polytetra fluoroethylene(PTFE)slurry and grinding with alcohol,
were given to samples to over come the peak over lapping problems and toatta in fine particles izewhich
is important tominimize micro-absorption corrections,to give reproducible peak intensities and to
minimize preferred or ientation.A2y step of0.051/min and alongerd well time than normal were used
to reduce in terferences from background noise and to increase the counting statistics.Finally,the
sequential extraction procedure for metal speciation study has been applied on soil samples.Atomic
absorptionspectroscopy(AAS)was used to find the concentrations of metal fractions bound to various
forms.Applying all the threeprobes,the minerals in the soil scan be studied and identified,successfully.