Discrimination of hematite and magnetite in finely intergrown natural iron ores by automated mineralogy.

Providing a fast, quantitative characterization of iron ores in terms of liberation, grain sizes and shapes as well as mineral association remains a big challenge. Whilst quantitative mineralogical data are easily attained by QXRD, an automated SEM-EDS based approach is needed for the quantification of relevant microfabric attributes. Two different iron ores were investigated for this study, to illustrate the capabilities and limitations of the latter approach. The first example is a banded-iron formation (BIF) ore from Thabazimbi/RSA, the second ore type studied is a magnetite iron ore from Svappavaaragruvan, c. 50 km east of Kiruna/N-Sweden. The greatest difficulty in the characterization of iron ores is certainly the discrimination between different relevant iron oxides (magnetite, hematite, goethite) that are all of very similar elemental composition – and thus have both very similar backscattered electron (BSE) brightness, as well as almost identical EDS spectra. A principle approach was suggested by Figueroa et al. (2011) by using the Mineral Liberation Analyzer (MLA). The suitability of this method was illustrated on synthetic mixtures. The approach of the present study utilizes the method on thin sections of natural iron ores, which show a fine intergrowth of hematite and magnetite with an unknown composition. For calibration, an in-house magnetite and hematite standard was prepared to further optimize the set-up of the method. A new feature in the MLA suite v.3.1.4 is the capability to define the exact working distance for every single sample separately. Slight variations in the working distance between the different samples and the standard were equalized. The MLA results were compared to bulk chemical data as well as traditional point counting-data by reflected light-microscopy. The results are within a relative error of 5 %. It can be concluded that the method was successfully applied and can be applied to iron ores with complex oxide mineral associations.