Mining & Refining

Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, usually from an orebody, vein, or (coal) seam. Materials recovered by mining include base metals, precious metals, iron, uranium, coal, diamonds, limestone, oil shale, rock salt, and potash.

Whether the determination entails the measurement of ores, feed, slags, or tailings in the mining process, X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy is one of the most commonly employed techniques for these routine determinations of metal-bearing minerals and metals and their oxides.

NEX CG II Series benchtop spectrometers are powered by Rigaku’s RPF-SQX Fundamental Parameters (FP) software, featuring Rigaku Profile Fitting (RPF) technology and Scattering FP. This robust software allows semi-quantitative analysis of almost all sample types without standards – and rigorous quantitative analysis with standards. Rigaku’s Scattering FP method automatically estimates the concentration of unmeasurable low atomic number elements (hydrogen to fluorine) and provides appropriate corrections.

Calibration standards can be expensive and difficult to obtain for many applications. With RPF-SQX, the number of required standards are greatly reduced, significantly lowering the cost of ownership and reducing workload requirements for running routine analyses.