  Following the recent suggestion that it is dwarf galaxies in clusters -- as
opposed to large ellipticals -- that provide the intracluster gas, we estimate
the metallicity of the intracluster medium (ICM) in such a case. We derive
analytical expressions for the fraction of mass of dwarf galaxies that is
ejected, and estimate the metallicity of the resulting intracluster gas. We
find that the metallicity resulting from this hypothesis is adequate only for
clusters with low-metallicity gas. Since galactic winds from dwarf galaxies
occur much earlier than those from ellipticals, due to the smaller binding
energy of the gas, we show that the gas ejected by dwarf galaxies is enriched
mostly by Type II supernovae, as opposed to Type I supernovae in the case of
large galaxies. We further point out that the gas in small scale structures,
which never cools and forms stars due to low temperatures and, consequently,
large cooling time scale, gets dispersed in the process of hierarchical
clustering, and is incorporated as the diffuse intracluster gas. We show that
this process can provide enough hot gas to be compatible with X-ray
observations in rich clusters.
