On clay minerals in Amakusa pottery stone.

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...

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 and non-clay minerals in the pharmaceutical industry

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 ...

Multifaceted role of clay minerals in pharmaceuticals

The desirable physical and physiochemical properties of clay minerals have led them to play a substantial role in pharmaceutical formulations. Clay minerals like kaolin, smectite and palygorskite-sepiolite are among the world's most valuable industrial minerals and of considerable importance. The elemental features of clay minerals which caused them to be used in pharmaceutical formulations are...