MinPlot: A mineral formula recalculation and plotting program for electron probe microanalysis

Abstract

MinPlot is a MATLAB®-based mineral formula recalculation and compositional plotting program for electron microprobe analyses (EPMA). The program offers recalculation and structural formula assignment for 15 different mineral groups: Garnet, pyroxene, olivine, amphibole, feldspar, mica, staurolite, cordierite, chlorite, chloritoid, talc, epidote, titanite, spinel, and sulfides. MinPlot is a fast and easy to use command line program and requires no prior computer programming knowledge. Percent mass fractions of oxides are loaded from datafiles and the user answers simple prompts to select mineral type, normalization scheme, and plotting options. Recalculated mineral formulas are automatically saved as output files and plots may be further manually customized by the user prior to saving. MinPlot can perform thousands of calculations in seconds and the modular nature of the program makes it simple to add new calculation routines in future releases. Combined, these features make MinPlot a powerful and useful program for the processing of EPMA data.