Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy—An Emerging Analytical Tool for Mineral Exploration

Abstract

The mineral exploration industry requires new methods and tools to address the challenges of declining mineral reserves and increasing discovery costs. Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) represents an emerging geochemical tool for mineral exploration that can provide rapid, in situ, compositional analysis and high-resolution imaging in both laboratory and field and settings. We demonstrate through a review of previously published research and our new results how LIBS can be applied to qualitative element detection for geochemical fingerprinting, sample classification, and discrimination, as well as quantitative geochemical analysis, rock characterization by grain size analysis, and in situ geochemical imaging. LIBS can detect elements with low atomic number (i.e., light elements), some of which are important pathfinder elements for mineral exploration and/or are classified as critical commodities for emerging green technologies. LIBS data can be acquired in situ, facilitating the interpretation of geochemical data in a mineralogical context, which is important for unraveling the complex geological history of most ore systems. LIBS technology is available as a handheld analyzer, thus providing a field capability to acquire low-cost geochemical analyses in real time. As a consequence, LIBS has wide potential to be utilized in mineral exploration, prospect evaluation, and deposit exploitation quality control. LIBS is ideally suited for field exploration programs that would benefit from rapid chemical analysis under ambient environmental conditions. Minerals 2019, 9, 718 2 of 45 government to search for additional mineral resources in green-field (i.e., remote) and brown-field (i.e., near mine) exploration environments [7][8][9]. However, the global trends of declining mineral reserves for many commodities and increasing discovery costs [3,4,10] suggest that exploration investment is insufficient and/or is not being deployed in the most effective manner possible. Both trends are also occurring at a time when new mineral deposit discoveries tend to be deeper, covered, and/or more remote, which are unlike near-surface mines that were often found, at least initially, by prospectors [4,[7][8][9]11].To address increasing demand and declining mineral reserves from deeper and more challenging deposits, the mineral exploration industry had to evolve and innovate by adopting new, cost-effective methodologies and technologies. For example, new conceptual models provide a predictive framework to identify the kinds of large-scale geological environments that should be considered the most prospective for finding additional mineral resources in greenfield areas of sparse geological data [12-15]. The ore system concept, which includes all of the geological processes required to transport and concentrate ore components from source to ore (i.e., drivers, sources, pathways, and traps), is one such predictive framework [12][13][14]16]. Because each of the required ore-forming components is manifested in the rock record as chan...

Emergences of New Technology for Ultrafast Automated Mineral Phase Identification and Quantitative Analysis Using the CORIOSITY Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) System

“…To assess mineral liberation during process analysis, a lower spatial resolution may be enough to map the abundance of key minerals; therefore, LIBS technology is applicable to both high-resolution mapping and fast process analysis. Published LIBS studies applied to the mining industry have mainly focused on the quantitative analysis of major and minor elements (e.g., Harmon et al (2013) [14] and Harmon et al (2019) [15]). Jolivet et al reviewed the recent advances and applications of LIBS imaging [16].…”

Geographical Origin Authentication of Agri-Food Products: A Review

“…Modern instruments used for the above processes include plasma laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) [8], fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), near-infrared (NIR) and mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy, chromatographic techniques as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) or high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), electron spin resonance (ESR), polymerase chain reaction (PCR), enzymatic assays (ELISA), techniques DNA based and isotope-ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) with high measurement accuracy, which were developed to serve this need [3,[9][10][11].…”

Editorial for Special Issue “Novel Methods and Applications for Mineral Exploration”

“…An intriguing paper by Harmon et al [6] describes a novel analytical tool that has high potential in mineral exploration: laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). A review of previously published research and new data demonstrates the high usefulness of this method in geochemical fingerprinting, sample classification and discrimination, quantitative geochemical analysis, rock characterization by grain size analysis, and in situ geochemical imaging.…”