In the field or at the core shed, geologists are often constrained to what minerals they can see with their hand lens. Due to the fine-grained nature of alteration that often accompanies gold mineralization, visual assessments made by the geologist are often subjective and, frequently, wrong. Samples are often sent off site to a laboratory for petrographic analysis. This procedure is time-intensive and expensive and sometimes fails to distinguish between minerals that have vastly different origins (e.g. formed by ground water or mineralizing fluids). Further, differentiating similar minerals, such as clays, carbonates, and fine-grained sulfides, is extremely difficult under the microscope.
Olympus pXRD provides geologists with reliable, qualitative, and quantitative mineralogical data in near real time in the field, at the drill-rig, or in the core-shed. The information that pXRD provides is objective, rather than subjective, and would take weeks or months to obtain using traditional methods. Using an Olympus pXRD instrument, geologists can quickly make important decisions, such as:
Aside from alteration vectoring, quantitative mineralogy provides important geo-metallurgical and mineral processing information for future mine design. |
* D Burkett, I Graham, L Spencer, P Lennox, D Cohen, H Zwingmann, F Lau, B Kelly and D Cendon. (2015). “The Kulumadau Epithermal Breccia-hosted Gold Deposit, Woodlark Island, Papua New Guinea.” Pacific Rim Congress 2015, Hong Kong, China. The Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, pages 1–8.