UVES Advanced Data Products Quasar Sample. VI.

We present measurements of the metallicity of a new sample of 15 sub-damped Lyman {alpha} absorbers (sub-DLAs, defined as absorbers with 19.0 z_abs_<=3.104 from the ESO Ultra-Violet Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) Advanced Data Products Quasar Sample (EUADP). We combine these results with other measurements from the literature to produce a compilation of metallicity measurements for 92 sub-DLAs as well as a sample of 362 DLAs.

We apply a multi-element analysis to quantify the amount of dust in these two classes of systems. We find that either the element depletion patterns in these systems differ from the Galactic depletion patterns or they have a different nucleosynthetic history than our own Galaxy. We propose a new method to derive the velocity width of absorption profiles, using the modelled Voigt profile features.