Inorganic Chemical Composition Analysis of 10 Different Types of Commercial Salt by Wavelength Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence (WDXRF) Method

Abstract

Salt is one of the most used seasoning in culinary with a great variety of them. Despite that, there is not a lot of published studies that analyses its compositions, differences and similarities between them. Thus, this research aims to determine the inorganic composition of table, light, pink and black Himalayan, Hawaii’s red, Persian blue, Mediterranean sea and three Argentinian gourmet salts by the Wavelength Dispersive X-ray Fluorescence (WDXRF) method in order to compare them using PCA and HCA analysis. Na and Cl were major elements found in all samples. As for trace elements: Al, Si, S and K in drastically different concentrations, due to conservation of nutrients from the soil, water or additives. These differences were used to distinct three groups showing that there is between 70 and 60% similarity among the nine samples, while the light salt does not have similarity to any other salt studied.