Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Endmember
Summary
An endmember (also end-member or end member) in mineralogy is a mineral that is at the extreme end of a mineral series in terms of purity of its chemical composition. Minerals often can be described as solid solutions with varying compositions of some chemical elements, rather than as substances with an exact chemical formula. There may be two or more endmembers in a group or series of minerals.
For example, forsterite (Mg2SiO4) and fayalite (Fe2SiO4) are the two end-members of the olivine solid-solution series, varying in Mg2+ and Fe2+ in their chemical composition. So, the chemical formula of olivine can be better expressed as or .
As another example, the tectosilicate feldspar can be described as a solid solution of the endmembers K-feldspar (KAlSi3O8), albite (NaAlSi3O8) and anorthite (CaAl2Si2O8). A specific feldspar can have varying quantities of potassium (K), sodium (Na) and calcium (Ca).
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.