The formation of Brazilian minerals database for integrated SEM-EDS system applied to the gold ore characterization.

Abstract

The mineralogical characterization of the Brazilian minerals variety occurrence is one of the key steps in the design of the mineral processing route and improving the overall process efficiency. This set of information is essential in assessing the technical and economic viability of a mineral Project. Among the variety mineralogical characterization techniques, automated analyzers are gaining great prominence because they provide qualitative and quantitative data in an automated manner, with great speed and accuracy. The system, available in the NanoLab at the Laboratory of the Mining-Metallurgic Centre/REDEMAT and specifically called TIMA-MIRA, is composed of a scan control program and analysis of mineral data (TIMA - Tescan Integrated Mineral Analyzer) and a scanning electron microscope with cannon field emission of electrons associated with two energy dispersive detector characteristic X-rays (MIRA - trade name). The system uses a mineral database consisting of association images by back scattered electrons of the mineral grains, with their characteristic X-ray spectra and their comparison with the characteristic spectra of a database. The equipment has an interface that allows you to add minerals and other materials to their underlying database, which is critical to the result accuracy because the original equipment database that is created only with data of mineral samples from other countries would not identify minerals of national origin with its characteristic major and minor elements. These limitations of the database integrated mineral analyzer TIMA-MIRA motivated the construction of a new database through a selection methodology, preparation and analysis by diffraction rays and the TIMA-MIRA system, different context samples Brazilian geological. Each mineral was determined to be analyzed in the integrated mineral analysis system by the XR diffraction analysis. Thereby, we obtained the maximum and minimum intensities values of chemical elements peaks that make up the analyzed mineral obtaining thus new identification rules for each selected species and adapted some existing rules to meet the needs presente.