The swelling behavior of organoclays

Natural clay minerals are ideal nanofillers for polymer materials and have been attracted tremendous research and development interests in the past decade. The manufacture of clay nanofillers relies largely on the exfoliation of clay particle into individual clay platelets. Thus, understanding the interlayer swelling of clay minerals upon the adsorption of surfactants is important to the fabrication and design of polymer nanocomposites. This paper reports our recent experimental and theoretical studies on a variety of organoclays that show a linear relationship between the increase of d-spacing and the mass ratio between organic and clay.