Description
Barite powder
What is Barite?
• Chemistry: BaSO4, Barium Sulfate
• Class: Sulfates
• Group: Barite
• Uses: ore of barium, in heavy muds in oil-well drilling, to increase brilliance in the glass-making industry, as filler for paper, cosmetics, textiles, linoleum, rubber goods, and paints. Barite powder
• Specimens
Barite, barites, or heavy spar, a white, yellow, blue, red, or colorless mineral. It is a sulfate of barium, BaSO4, found in nature as tabular crystals or in granular or massive form and has a high specific gravity.
The mineral is widely distributed throughout the world. It often occurs in veins with lead and zinc minerals. It is insoluble in water, which this property is used in testing for sulfate radicals. It is practically insoluble under ordinary conditions in all the usual chemical reagents. Barite is a commercial source of barium and many of its compounds.
Ground barite is used as filler in the manufacture of linoleum, oilcloth, paper and textile manufacturing, rubber, and plastics. Finely ground barite makes a thixotropic mud for sealing oil wells during drilling. Prime white, bleached barite, is used as a pigment in white paint but is not as satisfactory as blanc fixe, a chemically precipitated barium sulfate, or lithopone, a mixture of barium sulfate, zinc sulfide, and zinc oxide.
Barites are a material with an environmental protecting function, it has a lot of advantages, such as strong inertia, good stability, acid and alkali proof, moderate rigidity, high specific gravity, high whiteness, and absorb harmful radial. So, it is widely used in the fields of all kinds of dope, middle and high-grade paint, engineering plastic, medicine compounding chemical industry, rubber, paper-making, pottery, cosmetics etc.
Barite is a common mineral and makes very attractive specimens. It often is an accessory mineral to other minerals and can make a nice backdrop to brightly colored crystals. At times bladed or tabular crystals of Barite form a concentric pattern of increasingly larger crystals outward.
This has the appearance of a flower and when colored red by iron stains, these formations are called “Desert Roses”. Because Barite is so common, it can be confused with other minerals. Celestite (SrSO4) has the same structure as barite and forms very similar crystals.
The two are indistinguishable by ordinary methods, but a flame test can distinguish them. By scrapping the dust of the crystals into a gas flame the color of the flame will confirm the identity of the crystal.
If the flame is a pale green it is barite, but if the flame is red it is celestite. The flame test works because the elements barium (Ba) and strontium (Sr) react in the flame and produce those colors.
