• Journal of the Mineralogical Society of Korea
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.127-134
• /
• 2005

Although the bulk composition of materials is one of the major considerations in extractive metallurgy and environmental science, surface composition and topography control surface reactivity, and consequently play a major role in determining metallurgical phenomena and pollution by heavy metals and organics. An understanding of interaction mechanisms of different chemical species at the mineral surface in an aqueous media is very important in natural environment and metallurgical processing. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) has been used as an ex-situ analytical technique, but the material to be analyzed can be any size from $100\;{\mu}m$ up to about 1 cm. It can also measure mixed solids powders, but it is impossible to ascertain the original source of resulting x-ray signals where they were emitted from, since it radiates and scans the macro sample surface area. The study demonstrated the ability of TOF-SIMS to detect individual organic species on the surfaces of mineral particles from plant samples and showed that the TOF-SIMS techniques provides an excellent tool for establishing the surface compositions of mineral grains and relative concentrations of chemicals on mineral species.