Abstract
Abstract. The new mineral species freitalite, C14H10, corresponding to the aromatic hydrocarbon anthracene, has been discovered on the mine dump of the Königin Carola shaft (also named Paul Berndt Mine), Freital, near Dresden, Saxony, Germany. The mineral forms thin blades or flakes of irregular shape up to a few millimetres in size and shows an intense violet or whitish-violet to white colour. Freitalite is a product of pyrolysis of coal at low oxygen fugacity and was formed by sublimation from a gas phase. The mineral is associated with sulfur and hoelite. Elemental analysis gave (in wt. %, average of three analyses) C 94.07, H 5.571 and total 99.641. The empirical formula is C14.00H9.88 (calculated for C = 14). The identity with anthracene was confirmed by infrared and Raman spectroscopy, high-performance liquid chromatography, gas chromatography with mass spectrometry, 1H and 13C NMR spectrometry, and X-ray powder diffraction. Freitalite is monoclinic, P21∕a, with lattice parameters a=8.5572(9), b=6.0220(5), c=11.173(1) Å, β=124.174(1)∘ and V=476.34(3) Å3 refined from powder data. The calculated density of 1.242 g cm−3 (for Z=2) is very close to the measured density of 1.240 g cm−3. Freitalite was accepted as a new mineral by the Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification of the International Mineralogical Association (IMA 2019-116).
Highlights
The mineral was found in 1987 and 1988 on the mine dump of the coal mine Königin Carola shaft (Paul Berndt Mine), Freital, Döhlen basin, near Dresden, Saxony, Germany, by one of the authors (Thomas Witzke)
Freitalite is a product of pyrolysis of coal at low oxygen fugacity and was formed by sublimation from a gas phase
Freitalite was accepted as a new mineral by the Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification of the International Mineralogical Association (IMA 2019-116)
Summary
The mineral was found in 1987 and 1988 on the mine dump of the coal mine Königin Carola shaft (Paul Berndt Mine), Freital, Döhlen basin, near Dresden, Saxony, Germany, by one of the authors (Thomas Witzke). The aromatic hydrocarbon compound C14H10 is known with two isomers: anthracene and phenanthrene The latter was described as the mineral ravatite (IMA 1992-019) from a burning coal seam near Ravat, Tajikistan (Nasdala and Pekov, 1993). According to the new guideline of the Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification (CNMNC) of the IMA (Parafiniuk and Hatert, 2020), phases forming on burning coal dumps with no human agency initiating the fire and no anthropogenic material deposited there should be treated as minerals. The mineral kratochvilite, C13H10 (fluorene), is very similar in visual appearance and chemical composition It is originally described from the burning dumps of the mines Max and Schoeller at Libušin near Kladno, Czech Republic (Rost, 1937). Material from an additional sample in the museum, no. 30345, labelled as kratochvilite by Rost, could be used for the study
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