The determination of mineral concentrations in rice grain samples is crucial for analyzing their nutritional content. Most mineral content analysis techniques depend on inductively coupled plasma (ICP) spectrometry and are often complicated, expensive, time-consuming, and laborious. Recently, the handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer has been randomly used in earth sciences; however, it is hardly practiced in quantifying mineral content in rice samples. In this research, the reliability of XRF results was compared with that of the ICP-OES to determine zinc (Zn) concentration in rice (Oryza sativa L.). Approximately 200 dehusked rice samples and four known high-Zn samples were analyzed using both XRF and ICP-OES techniques. The concentrations of Zn were recorded using the XRF technique and then correlated with the ICP-OES results. The results indicated a high positive relationship between two methods, with R2 = 0.83, p = 0.000, and the Pearson correlation value of 0.91 at the level of 0.05. This work demonstrates the potential of XRF as a reliable and low-cost as well as an alternative technique to ICP-OES methods for determining Zn content in rice as it allows the analysis of a greater number of samples in a short period at a considerably low price.
Keywords: ICP-OES; X-ray fluorescence spectrometry; elements; rice; zinc.