CHEMICAL AND MINERALOGIC STUDY OF MADAGASCAR CORAL BY SPECTROSCOPY

Analytical chemestry

Developing countries are faced with the problem of poor nutrition including calcium and magnesium deficiency. However, hard coral is surrounded by an external skeleton, rich in calcium carbonate, which it builds as it grows. They usually live in colonies and form coral reefs. Sometimes pieces of the reef break away from the colony and migrate to the bottom of the sea where they fossilize. Our goal is to study the corals of Madagascar, which are part of the natural marine environments of the east coast of the Grande-ile. Thus, in the first place, the determination of the chemical composition of the coral of Madagascar, on the one hand, by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy for the chemical elements at Z> 12, and on the other hand, by atomic absorption spectroscopy for the element Mg at Z = 12 not detectable by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy because of the spectroscope detector. These two methods have shown the absence of toxic chemicals in the corals of Madagascar. In the second place, the determination of the mineralogical composition of the coral of Madagascar by X-ray diffraction spectroscopy of Debye-Scherrer. This method shows that the corals of Madagascar are constituted by the aragonite crystal structure in accordance with the literature. Our study has shown that it is possible to enhance the exoskeleton of corals in Madagascar, which is composed of 91.5% CaO, including 65.36% calcium and 0.21% magnesium.

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