Beneath the scaly clay and clay breccia of Karangsambung area

Clay and non-clay minerals in the pharmaceutical industry

The Clay Minerals Society Glossary for Clay Science Project

The Clay Minerals Society (CMS) Nomenclature Committee was asked by CMS Council to produce a glossary of clay science in 2003. The Committee developed several constraints on the development of the glossary: (1) it was decided to produce a glossary of clay terms, based on clay science. Terms may have other meanings in other disciplines, but the Committee did not want to include how other discipl...

Clay exfoliation and polymer/clay aerogels by supercritical carbon dioxide

Supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) treatments of a montmorillonite (MMT) intercalated with ammonium cations bearing two long hydrocarbon tails (organo-modified MMT, OMMT) led to OMMT exfoliation, with loss of the long-range order in the packing of the hydrocarbon tails and maintenance of the long-range order in the clay layers. The intercalated and the derived exfoliated OMMT have been deeply...

Role of clay microstructure in expandable buffer clay

Smectite-rich clay is a major engineered barrier (buffer) in repositories for heat-producing highly radioactive waste. It has the form of densely compacted blocks of clay granules and is only partly water saturated from start. The initial porewater is redistributed by the thermal gradient acting in the buffer and additional water is taken up to give ultimately complete saturation. The compactio...

Clay Minerals and Catalysis

More than half a century ago, Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal and Swiss geochemist Victor M. Goldschmidt independently proposed that clay minerals may have played an important role in prebiotic synthesis (Bernal 1949; Goldschmidt 1952). I concur that mineral catalysis must have had a central role in prebiotic synthesis because most uncatalyzed reactions start from simple precursors like hyd...