Browsing by Author "Roth, EW"

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    Hybrid microstructure of smectite clay gels revealed using neutron and synchrotron X-ray scattering
    (Springer Nature, 2023-11-07) Shoaib, M; Khan, S; Wani, OB; Mata, JP; Krzysko, AJ; Kuzmenko, I; Bluel, M; Fiddes, LF; Roth, EW; Bobicki, ER
    Aqueous suspensions of swelling clays display a nematic sol-gel transition at very low solid concentrations. The underlying microstructure of the gel has remained a point of contention since the time of Irving Langmuir and has been a major obstacle to fully realizing the potential of clays for practical applications. Here, we comprehensively probe the microstructure of a smectite clay suspension using ultra-small angle neutron/X-ray scattering and find that the nematic gel is structurally ordered and contains entities that are at least an order of magnitude larger than the individual particles. Complementary cryo-electron microscopy shows the presence of domains having particle-particle ordering responsible for nematic texture and regions of particle-particle aggregation responsible for gel-like behavior. We find that the smectic clay gels have a hybrid microstructure with co-existing repulsive nematic domains and attractive disordered domains. © 2023 The Author(s). Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.