A study of surface morphology of small magnesite ore blocks using numerical computations

Abstract

Determination of morphological structure of natural ore is an important concept. Although there are many studies related to the determination of the chemical structure of minerals, there has not been much work about the macroscopic morphology of magnesite ore blocks at the surface. In this purpose with respect to that this study investigates surface morphology of the raw magnesite ore deposits using self-affine fractal behaviors. The surfaces of the magnesite ore blocks were scanned using a scanner followed by a computer. To describe the surface morphologies of the ore, the numerical computations were performed as the fractal dimensions, the root mean square (rms) sigma which is the classical statistical expected values, the arithmetic roughness R-A and Hurst exponent H on a finite square lattice of lateral lengths L = 64, 100, 128, 200 and 256 pixels for the samples, respectively. For each sample, the values of fractal dimensions estimated within a narrow range from 1.611 to 1.752 and from 1.562 to 1.827, respectively. In addition to that H values were computed and changed as from 0.193 to 0.270 and from 0.147 to 0.208, respectively. As the values of Hurst exponents were found to be less than 0.5 (H<0.5) it may indicate that the mineralization is weak in the magnesite ore. In addition, the surface morphologies were characterized by self-affine fractal scaling behavior over the correlation length scales. The surface morphologies of magnesite ore blocks may reveal anti-persistent behavior at this scale. Hence, it may be argued that the results reached by this study may be used to understand self-affine growth in geophysical sciences.