Industrial sand is used in filtration of drinking water, processing of wastewater and production of water from wells. Uniform grain shapes and grain size distributions produce efficient filtration bed operation to remove contaminants in both potable water and wastewater. This paper is aimed at finding out the suitability of silica sand from Bukkuyum Local Government Area of Zamfara State of Nigeria, as filtration sand for wastewater and portable water treatment, using Empyrean diffractometer DY 674 (2010 ) for XRD phase analysis of the sample. The peaks generated matched those of silica in ICDD PDF 2 (2010) database. Minipal 4 energy dispersive X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) provided the elemental analysis in their oxides, SiO2 of 76.93%, Al2O3 of 14.98% K2O of 6.43%, Fe2O3 of 0.58%, TiO2 of 0.12%, CaO of 0.71%, MgO of 0.03%, loss on ignition (LOI) of 0.04% as major component and SEM provided the photomicrograph picture with the fiber histogram giving the statistics of particle size 1.63, 8.70 and 22.93 µm, with the objective of giving adequate information about this application.

Keywords: Suitability, silica sand, X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), scanning electron microscopy (SEM)