Physical Properties of Minerals (Quartz)

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What is Quartz?

Quartz could also be a compound consisting of one 0.5 semiconductor and a couple of parts number eight. it's silica (SiO). it is the foremost abundant mineral found at layer, and its distinctive properties build it one all told the foremost useful natural substances.

Quartz


Where is Quartz Found?

Quartz is that the foremost abundant and cosmopolitan mineral found at layer. it's gift and plentiful in all parts of the world. It forms in any respect temperatures. it's abundant in igneous, metamorphic, and substance rocks. it's very resistant to every mechanical and chemical weathering. This strength makes it the dominant mineral of mountaintops and conjointly the first constituent of beach, river, and desert sand. Quartz is gift, plentiful and durable. Minable deposits unit found throughout the world.


What unit the Uses for Quartz?

Quartz is one all told the foremost useful natural materials. Its utility could also be joined to its physical and chemical properties. it is a hardness of seven on the standard that produces it very durable. it's chemically inert in reality with most substances. it's electrical properties and heat resistance that build it valuable in electronic merchandise. Its luster, color, and diaphaneity build it useful as a stone and to boot at intervals the making of glass.


Uses of Quartz in Glass making

Geological processes have usually deposited sands that unit composed of as regards to 100% quartz grains. These deposits area unit far-famed and created as sources of high-purity silica sand. These sands unit used within the glassmaking business. Quartz sand is used at intervals the assembly of instrumentation glass, flat sheet, specialty glass, and building material.


Many different Quartz Sand Uses

Quartz sand is used as a filler at intervals the manufacture of rubber, paint, and putty. Screened and washed, painstakingly sized quartz grains unit used as filter media and roofing granules. Quartz sands unit used for traction at intervals the railroad and mining industries. These sands are used in recreation on golf courses, volleyball courts, baseball fields, children's sand boxes and beaches.  


Uses for Quartz Crystals

One of the foremost wonderful properties of quartz is that the ability of its crystals to vibrate at an explicit frequencies. These frequencies area unit thus precise that quartz crystals may be wont to build very correct time-keeping instruments and instrumentation which will transmit radio and tv signals with precise and stable frequencies.

The tiny devices used for these functions area unit called "crystal oscillators." the primary crystal oscillators were developed within the Nineteen Twenties, and simply twenty years later, tens of numerous them were required every year to produce the military throughout warfare II. Today, billions of quartz crystals area unit wont to build oscillators for watches, clocks, radios, televisions, electronic games, computers, cell phones, electronic meters, and GPS instrumentation.


Quartz as a crystal

Quartz makes a wonderful crystal. It is hard, durable, and typically accepts an excellent polish. fashionable forms of quartz that area unit wide used as gems include: amethyst, citrine, quartz, cairngorm, and transparent gem. chalcedony and opaque gem are forms of quartz with a crystalline structure.


Physical Properties 


Chemical Classification

Silicate

Color

Quartz occurs in virtually every color. Common colors are clear, white, gray, purple, yellow, brown, black, pink, green, red.

Streak

Colorless (harder than the streak plate)

Luster

Vitreous

Diaphaneity

Transparent to translucent

Cleavage

None – typically breaks with a conchoidal fracture

Mohs Hardness

7

Specific Gravity

2.6 to 2.7

Diagnostic Properties

Conchoidal fracture, glassy luster, hardness

Chemical Composition

SiO2

Crystal System

Hexagonal

Uses

Glass making, abrasive, foundry sand, hydraulic fracturing proppant, gemstones

 


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