Abstract
A qualitative chemical analysis of three reference clay minerals, Mikawa montmorillonite, synthetic saponite and Nabeyama illite, was performed using a recently developed TEM-EDS set-up built around a microcalorimeter device that has a very high energy resolution. The spectrum obtained by the microcalorimeter EDS showed the small peaks of minor elements present in these clay minerals. It was also used to detect the SKβ peak in saponite and the SiKβ' peak in montmorillonite and saponite whereas by conventional Si(Li) EDS, these peaks disappeared or overlapped. Microcalorimeter EDS with TEM provided us with valuable elemental data of clay minerals in this study, and will considerably contribute to the progress of the study of clay minerals.