Clays and Clay Minerals in the Construction Industry

Killer Clays! Natural antibacterial clay minerals

Clay minerals have been used in medicinal applications since Aboriginal times (Carretaro, 2002; Wilson, 2003). Clay poultices are used to heal wounds; people eat clays to coat stomach linings and soothe indigestion; animals eat clay containing trace elements (e.g., As) that can kill worms. The reasons that various clay minerals are effective as medicines may be as variable as the ailment, but b...

Clay and non-clay minerals in the pharmaceutical industry

Twelfth National Conference on Clays and Clay Minerals

Studies have been made on muscovite single crystals treated under dry and hydrothermal conditions at temperatures above 800~ The course of reaction is markedly affected by the amount of water present in the system. In the presence of a large excess of water, appreciable reaction commences at 8(~0~ with the formation of kalsilite and corundum. The kalsilite may bear an epitaxial relationship to ...

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...