Thermodynamic and thermoelastic data of georesources raw minerals: Zinc sulphide and apatite

This article reports a dataset on the thermodynamic and elastic properties of two important raw minerals exploited in georesources and ore mining. The presented data refers to two zinc sulphide polymorphs, namely zinc-blende (low-pressure polymorph, space group F4−3m) and rock-salt (high-pressure polymorph, space group Fm3−m) [1], and of type-A carbonated apatite, [CAp, Ca10(PO4)6CO3, space group P1] [2]. The data here reported were calculated from ab initio quantum mechanical simulations at the DFT/B3LYP level, all-electron Gaussian-type orbitals basis sets and from the analysis of the phonon properties of the zinc sulphide polymorphs and of type-A CAp by means of the quasi-harmonic approximation. In addition, a correction to take into account the effects of dispersive forces was considered to obtain the dataset of type-A carbonated apatite. This dataset, which was validated against experimental thermodynamic data reported in literature, has been employed to construct the phase diagram between the two zinc sulphide polymorphs and discuss their stability over the temperature and pressure range 0–800 K and 0–25 GPa. The thermodynamic and thermoelastic data of CAp were obtained between 0 and 600 K and 0–3 GPa, below the temperature of thermal decomposition of the mineral. The reported data can be of use in several application fields, for instance fundamental georesource exploration and exploitation, and also in applied mineralogy, geology, material science, and as a reference to assess the quality of other theoretical approaches. Furthermore, the data of type-A carbonated apatite could be useful for designing and processing new biomaterials with tailored properties.