Mineral Base Class¶

The Mineral class is the base class for all mineral phases in BurnMan. It derives from the Material Base Class (Material), using an equation of state to implement functionality specific to pure mineral phases with fixed chemical compositions and crystal structures.

Key Features¶

Equations of State: Minerals use a variety of implemented equations of state (EOS) to model their thermodynamic behaviour under varying pressure and temperature conditions. The EOS is selected at instantiation and governs property calculations.
Property Modifiers: Minerals can apply property modifiers to adjust baseline properties from the EOS. This allows incorporation of experimental corrections or additional physical effects.
Composition: Each Mineral instance has a fixed chemical composition defined at creation. This composition influences density, molar volume, and other derived properties.

Mineral Datasets¶

BurnMan includes a database of predefined mineral phases with commonly used equations of state and compositions. See Mineral Datasets for a list of the available mineral models.

Instantiation¶

Mineral objects are instantiated via a constructor that takes a dictionary of parameters as argument. The parameters required depend on the selected equation of state. Instantiation looks like this:

from burnman import Mineral

params = {
    'equation_of_state': 'slb3',  # using the Stixrude and Lithgow-Bertelloni EoS
    # EOS-specific parameters...
}

property_modifiers = [
    ['linear', {'delta_E': 1.e3, 'delta_S': 0., 'delta_V': 0.}],
    # Additional modifiers...
]

mineral = Mineral(params, property_modifiers)

An important parameter in the params dictionary is the equation_of_state key, which specifies the EOS to use. This can either be a string referring to a built-in EOS, or a custom EOS object implementing the required interface. Available equations of state, and their string identifiers, are described in Equations of State for Minerals.

Property modifiers are optional and can be omitted. See Mineral Property Modifiers for details.