Standardless quantitative mineralogical analysis of rocks

摘要

The main difficulty in the quantitative mineral analysis of rocks is connected with the variable nature of the mineral species. In the present paper a combined method (and a corresponding computer program) is proposed, which practically overcomes this difficulty. This method is based on linear equations, which are a combination of the chemical mass-balance equations with those of the quantitative X-ray diffractometry, and can perform (completely or partly) both the quantification and the chemical characterization of the minerals on several rock samples simultaneously, demanding only easily accessible initial information, such as:(i) major element (oxide) compositions for the samples; (ii) qualitative mineral composition of the samples; (iii) X-ray intensities for one or few nonoverlapped reflections of the crystalline minerals (not necessarily of all): (iv) some characteristic data for the phases (i.e., chemical composition data), if these are accurately known.