QUANTITATIVE MINERALOGY OF HIGH PURITY QUARTZ, CASE OF SPRUCE PINE, NORTH CAROLINA

High Purity Quartz is one of the important minerals in the electronic industry today, but production of extreme high purity quartz requires a detailed knowledge of the resource from mine to the processing plant. To achieve this, a detailed study of fed materials to the plants is required. Studies have shown that quartz can be contaminated with some minerals that need to be traced and removed so as to obtain high purity quartz as possible (at least 99.998% pure quartz). The common contaminant minerals are plagioclase, alkali felspars, biotite, muscovite, almandine-spessartine garnet, epidote, apatite, zircon, rutile, Ce-rich allanite and xenonite. These minerals may occur as micro inclusions in quartz and thus cause contaminations of Ca, Fe,Mn, P, Zr, Th, U Al, Na, Ca, K, TiO2, REE(Ce,Y), etc. Crushing and flotation are important stages towards quartz liberation from other minerals, but crushing is effective to a certain fraction size. In this study we investigated the crushed and floated Quartz samples with the following mesh sizes: 325, 200, 140, 100, 70, 50 and 40. Light microscopy, XRD, XRF, SEM and EPMA analysis were used. The results revealed that quartz liberation is maximum at 100-200 mesh.The poor quartz liberation at coarse grains is due to contact with other minerals while at very fine grains quartz liberation decline due to over crushing. The report is on the quantitative mineralogy of a deposit and develop a sampling procedures that can be used representatively for other quartz deposit