Research Mineralogy, Eastern Region

Project Home Tasks Products Contacts Links

Task Contact: Jane Hammarstrom

Task Objectives

Task Statement of Work

Task Products

Task Objectives

The goals of this task are to:

minimize duplication of skills and equipment by sharing laboratory facilities between the Mineal Resources and Energy Resources Programs,
develop new methods and new applications of existing methods, and
ensure availability of state-of-the art mineralogical analyses for Mineral Resources and Energy Resources staff.

Statement of Work

This year we will operate the Reston laboratory to provide mineralogical support for projects in the Minerals, Energy, and other Programs. The laboratory provides qualitative and semi-quantitive powder x-ray diffraction, energy-dispersive x-ray fluorescence, and thermogravimetric analysis with simultaneous evolved gas analysis. We will continue to develop protocols and applications of quantitative powder x-ray diffraction using full pattern Rietveld refinement for determining mineralogy, surrogate chemical composition, and amorphous material content of different sample media (mine wastes, soil, coal overburden, rocks, stream sediments and streambed precipitates). We will set up the lab to do selective dissolutions of poorly crystalline Fe- and Mn-minerals for differential x-ray diffraction. We will continue to investigate mineralogical controls on acid-base accounting, especially for samples that contain both sulfide and sulfate minerals and different types of carbonate minerals. We will investigate the relationship between grinding times and methods on production of amorphous material.

We will upgrade x-ray fluorescence (XRF) software to facilitate routine rapid XRF screening of the chemical composition of samples analyzed by x-ray diffraction (XRD).

Return to top of this page | Previous Task | Next Task | Task List


Mineral Resources	Eastern / Central / Western / Alaska / Minerals Information
Mineral Resources	Crustal Imaging & Characterization / Spatial Data