Molecular Simulations of Swelling Clay Minerals

Effect of Freezing on the Swelling of Clay Minerals

It has been known for some time that when a gel of montmorillonite is freeze-dried the residual clay retains the volume and shape of the gel, and forms a skeleton of low density and some rigidity. Because there is no apparent change in the gel structure during freeze-drying, the dry residues have been studied in the past in an effort to determine the structure of the gels. However, X-ray diffra...

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...

A molecular mechanism of hysteresis in clay swelling.

Clay Minerals: Adsorbophysical Properties

The structure and features of surfaces of clay minerals (kaolin, montmorillonite, etc) have an important scientific and practical value. On the surface the interrelation of processes at electronic, atomic and molecular levels is realized. Availability of mineral surface to external influences opens wide scientific and technical opportunities of use of the surface phenomena, so the research of c...

Clay Minerals as Natural Nanosheets

Particles with nanometer dimensions (nanoparticles) are all around us. The finest particles of sand are blown by the wind over thousands of kilometers. The finest particles of soils are either eroded by the wind in extremely dry conditions or by water under wet conditions and deposited hundreds of kilometers or more from the origin. The air contains nanoparticles of carbon, ice, and oxides and ...