NIGK17004U Applied Mineralogy

Mineralogical skills are of great value for investigation and exploitation of mineral resources, for construction industry, for the industry that uses or produces natural and natural-like materials (including development of novel materials for future technologies), and for the environmental protection. They are, of course, also basis for using mineralogical methods of research in the geoscientific research in general. The mineralogical skills are based on understanding of specific features and properties of minerals, constituents of the natural inorganic materials, and on an insight into technologies based on their application. The course covers both aspects and is recommended to students of natural sciences, primarily geosciences, physics and chemistry, who plan their careers in the above mentioned fields.

The lectures and exercises are targeted first at giving students a good background at understanding and learning principles that govern the constitution and behaviour of minerals: crystallographic rules and terminology and thermodynamics of crystal growth, phase transitions, solid solutions, stability limits and processes of breakdown of solid phases, like exsolution processes and topotactic transformations. This is succeeded by learning tools and methods of applied Mineralogy: principles of diffraction and imaging, atomic coordination and chemical bond investigation by spectroscopic methods, with an introduction to the most used methods. Finally, an introduction is given to industrial materials to which the mineralogical methods are applied, including the classical fields of cement and concrete, ceramics and glass, various other materials that harvest specific mineral properties (like hardness, density, colour, chemical resistivity, or thermal resistivity), and the novel "smart" materials (based on optical, electric and magnetic properties) that are inspired by mineral materials or for which mineral resources are exploited.