The determination of gypsum in soils

Abstract

This chapter of Soil Analysis Methods by Herrero et al. (2016) presents and discusses three simple gravimetric and spectroscopic methods for gypsum determination. First they present the Artieda method (Artieda et al., 2006) and second the Lebron method (Lebron et al., 2009), both based on measuring different water exchanges between the atmosphere and gypsum. The third presented method (Weindorf et al., 2013) uses the determination of specific chemical elements via portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy as a proxy for gypsum determination; a key advantage being, this approach is field portable. These three methods use few, if any, chemicals and only rudimentary lab equipment.