Development of Modification/Hybrid Technology for Clay Minerals and their Applications

Abstract

Various nano-scale materials and an abundance of recipes, which offer many potential benefits in our life and contribute to create a sustainable society, are latent in nature. Clay minerals have various polymorphous nanomaterials such as nano-sheet, nano-ball, and nano-tube, which all show their unique physicochemical properties including ion exchange, adsorption, colloidal nature, and swelling. Our life benefits unknowingly from these materials in so many ways. In recent years, great progress has been made to structural analysis and clarification of various properties of clay minerals in synthetic, surface modification and compounding techniques. This paper describes recent new efforts in research on the functional clay materials utilizing smectites, micas, and layered double hydroxides.