A biased Monte Carlo method for the insertion of water in dense clay–water systems is presented. The use of this algorithm results in a considerable increase of the success rate of insertion attempts. It allows us to compute water adsorption isotherms up to high water densities, where the conventional Monte Carlo scheme fails. The isotherms were calculated by a combination of molecular dynamics...

The lightweight aggregates used by the civil engineering market are sintered at a high temperature, about 1200 °C. In times of high energy prices and regulation of carbon dioxide emissions, lightweight aggregate products of the high-temperature process in sales marketing are not readily accepted. This study developed a sintered-type paper sludge lightweight aggregate. In order to reduce energy ...

The thermal properties such as specific heat capacity and heat dissipation of peloids play an important role in therapeutic applications. Therefore, these properties were determined on the peloids samples taken from spas where peloid applications are used in Turkey. In addition, some pure clay minerals were investigated to determine their suitability as possible constituents of therapeutic pelo...

A combined clinical, radiological, pathological, and mineralogical study was undertaken on 62 cases referred to the Medical Research Council Pneumoconiosis Unit by the Cardiff Pneumoconiosis Panel as Cornish china clay workers. Considerable pathological lesions were found in the lungs, both nodular and interstitial fibroses being present. Some men had worked with china stone but others had work...

sons, clay and organic matter differences between soils should be incorporated into any kind of predictive model. Measuring the cation exchange capacity (CEC) for all horizons of Several researchers have attempted to predict CEC every map unit component in a survey area is very time consuming from clay and organic C contents alone, using multiple and costly. The objective of this study was to d...

The combination of Ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA) with nanoclay has wide commercial applications (such as packaging films and cables), which depend on the vinyl acetate contained in the main chain. As the vinyl acetate content increases, the copolymer presents less crystallinity and different mechanical behavior. EVA with 40 wt% vinyl acetate content (EVA40)/ organoclay nanocomposites w...

Soil moisture hampers the estimation of soil variables such as clay content from remote and proximal sensing data, reducing the strength of the relevant spectral absorption features. In the present study, two different strategies have been evaluated for their ability to minimize the influence of soil moisture on clay estimation by using soil spectra acquired in a laboratory and by simulating sa...

[1] We report results on the effects of porewater pH and transients in porewater flow on the deposition and mobilization of colloid-sized clay particles within unsaturated sand columns. The deposition rates of illite under steady-flow conditions were essentially independent of pH, while the deposition rates of kaolinite nearly doubled as the pH decreased from 7.4 to 4.6. Mobilization of kaolini...

In this paper a new approach is presented based on evolutionary polynomial regression (EPR) for modelling of soil–water characteristic curve in unsaturated soils. EPR is an evolutionary data mining technique that generates a transparent and structured representation of the behaviour of a system directly from data. This method can operate on large quantities of data in order to capture nonlinear...

Column experiments were conducted to study chemical factors that influence the release of clay (kaolinite and quartz minerals) from saturated Ottawa sand of different sizes (710,360, and 240 microm). A relatively minor enhancement of clay release occurred when the pH was increased (5.8 to 10) or the ionic strength (IS) was decreased to deionized (DI) water. In contrast, clay release was dramati...