Swift X-ray Telescope Cluster Survey. II.

We detect the iron emission lines in 35% of the sample, and hence obtain a robust measure of the X-ray redshift z_X_ with typical rms error 1-5%. We use z_X_ whenever the optical redshift is not available. Finally, for all the sources with measured redshift, background-subtracted spectra are fitted with a single-temperature mekal model to measure global temperature, X-ray luminosity and iron abundance of the ICM.

We perform extensive spectral simulations to accounts for fitting bias, and to assess the robustness of our results. We derive a criterion to select reliable best-fit models and an empirical formula to account for fitting bias. The bias-corrected values are then used to investigate the scaling properties of the X-ray observables.