my work is on determining the mineralization potential of pegmatite and I am interested in suing the XRD and XRF for my geochemical analysis. How can the graph of intensity vs energy be to quantitatively determine ore minerals present in the rock?
You can use the characteristic elements of your pegmatite in case of a so-called rare-element pegmatite (Be, Li, Nb/Ta..) and analyze these elements with XRF (more advanced- level methods) and determine your ore minerals with quantitative XRD. The crucial point is the sampling campaign and the mapping in the field supported by drilling operations. In this case big-back samples are necessary or channel samples perpendicular to the zonation of the pegmatite. This is valid the more so in case of pure feldspar-quartz-mica pegmatites. All your measurements with the most highly sophisticated equipment are in vain if the sampling and mapping is done in a slobby way.
If you only want to write another paper about a new mineral you can conduct random sampling only hunting for the mineral and finding it by chance.
HGD
In order to investigate the effect of analysis time parameter on the quality of X-ray diffraction (XRD) diagrams, a sandstone sample whose main phases are quartz, plagioclase and its sub-phases are clay minerals, alkaline feldspars, halite, dolodite and heptathite. The load was subjected to X-ray diffraction spectroscopy with different times ranging from 11 minutes to 5.5 hours. Elemental analysis of X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy was used to determine the exact percentage of clay minerals and other associated minerals. The results of this study showed that the intensity of the strongest peak of the main constituents of the sample has a linear relationship with increasing the analysis time, which has a high degree of correlation (0.93 for quartz and 0.89 for plagioclase). If the analysis time is less than 55 minutes, there is a risk that some major phases will not be seen due to the sharp decrease in peak intensity. Having the same stop time in each step, increasing the number of steps improves the quality of the chart. Also, in the case where the total analysis time is the same, the intensity of the peaks of the main components is almost the same and increasing the number of steps does not improve the quality of the resulting graph. Spending about two hours on the analysis will significantly improve the results, and increasing the time more than this will result in more intensities, but allocating this amount of time to each sample is economically justified for mineral analysis laboratories. It is not acceptable.
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Methodology
- Crystallography
- X-ray Diffraction