Prep lab

Rock and mineral prep laboratory

Background

We oversee a brand new mineral and rock preparation laboratory in the same building as the main ICP-MS/XRF laboratory. We affectionately call it the pit or the "19th century lab" because it hosts rock crushing and preparation tools that resemble an older age. Nevetheless, all parts of this laboratory were purchased in 2021-2025 and are state of the art tools.

Facilities

We have the following tools available in the laboratory:

Sample crushing jaw crusher (Retsch BB100) - the crusher can take large rock fragments and crush them into sand size particles
Spex Shatterbox. This classic powdering device takes samples down to < 40 microns in size
Environmentally friendly heavy liquids setup for separating heavy fractions from rock samples
Franz LB1 magnetic separator
Katanax oven. This one-sample holder device fuses whole rock samples automatically with the aid of various fluxes which we have ready for use
Rock polishing and various tools for mineral encasting and prepping for laser ablation analyses.
Various picking scopes and tools for mineral separations. We have now acquired one new petrographic microscope and two binocular microscopes (one Nikon and one Olympus) with all the tools needed to perform mineral separation and picking as well as a good petrographic analysis of samples.
A new thin section preparation machine by Buehler

Jaw crusher (Retsch BB100) and Spex Shatterbox

Availability

We charge separately for mineral and rock preparation. Please inquire for various costs involved in preparation for whole rock geochemical analyses. The rock prep laboratory is also open upon request and pending training to students and outside users to use for purposes not related to the ICP-MS laboratory.

Important note:

We charge 250 euros for zircon separation per detrital sample, 100 for a magmatic sample . Other heavies come out as well but are not separated with any degree of quality. We also collaborate with an external laboratory for mineral sep.

We also have facilities for preparing minerals for laser ablation measurement - encasing them and polishing them into 1 inch round mounts for example. We use a binocular microscope to photograph the samples and print the images for ease of use when the sampes are under the LA system.

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