Industrial Garnet; Hardest Mineral Ideal for Use as an Effective Abrasive in Various End-Use Industries
Industrial Garnet |
Garnet has become a bona fide industrial commodity as it is a nearly
perfect industrial abrasive. Industrial
Garnet is mostly mined for industrial applications and very few numbers of
garnet are flawless and pure to be mined as a gemstone. However, most of the
garnets are crushed and used to make abrasives across various end-use industries.
The first industrial use of garnet was as an abrasive. Industrial
Garnet is a relatively hard mineral with a hardness that ranges
between 6.5 and 7.5 on the Mohs Scale. That allows it to be used in many types
of manufacturing.
Garnet as an industrial mineral. Domestic
industries that consume garnet include aircraft and automotive manufacturers,
electronic component manufacturers, ceramics and glass producers, filtration
plants, the petroleum industry, glass polishing, textile stonewashing, shipbuilders,
and wood-furniture-finishing operations. Besides its application in
construction, garnet is used to manufacture automobile parts, repair ships, and
in petrochemical plants. Its growing usage in oil and gas drilling is likely to
contribute to the increase in demand for this mineral.
There are more than twenty garnet
categories, called species, of which only 5 are commercially important as gems;
such as pyrope, grossular (grossularite), spessartine, almandine (almandite),
and andradite. A sixth, uvarovite, is a green garnet that usually occurs as
crystals too small to cut. The rock-forming garnets are most common in
metamorphic rocks. A few occur in igneous rocks, especially granites and
granitic pegmatites. Garnets derived from these/such rocks occur sporadically
in clastic sediments and sedimentary rocks.
Industrial
Garnet is also used for abrasive blasting,
water-jet-assisted cutting, water-filtration media, and other end uses, such as
in sandpaper, nonslip coatings, & abrasive powders, among others. The
majority of garnets are crushed and utilized as abrasives in a variety of
industries, and thus, there is an increase in demand for industrial garnet
worldwide. Most industrial-grade garnet mined in the U.S. are almandine (iron
aluminum silicate), pyrope (magnesium aluminum silicate), and some andradite
(calcium iron silicate).
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