Cooling history based on other heterogeneous reactions

5 Cooling history based on other heterogeneous reactions 

Heterogeneous reactions are the most common type of reactions in petrology and volcanology. Component exchange between the two phases discussed above 

Many minerals show exsolution textures. For these minerals, there is complete solid solution at sufficiently high temperatures, but a miscibility gap at lower temperatures. The alkali feldspar, (Na, K)AlSi30s, is an example. Suppose a roughly homogenous mineral of intermediate composition cools down and into 

Marsh (1988), Cashman and Marsh (1988), and Cashman and Ferry (1988) investigated the application of crystal size distribution (CSD) theory (Randolph and Larson, 1971) to extract crystal growth rate and nucleation density. The following summary is based on the work of Marsh (1988). In the CSD method, the crystal population density, n(L), is defined as the number of crystals of a given size L per unit volume of rock. The cumulative distribution function N(L) is defined as 

That is, N(L) is the total numbers of crystals with size smaller than L per unit volume of the rock. 

---