Bengaluru: Scientists from Raman Research Institute (RRI) have found that the properties of clay dispersion, including artificial – laponite – can be controlled by changing the water structure by adding additive molecules into it.
These, they say, can help control the time needed to change the liquid to the soft solid state, thereby increasing the stability and life of these ingredients used in cosmetics and personal care products, pharmaceuticals, paper fillers, paper fillers, paper fillers, fillers Paper, paper fillers, paper fillers, paper fillers in cosmetics and nano-composite.
This research can also provide new tools to achieve control over the nature of clay suspension and can help understand and predict the mass flow of land and mud, especially in the formation of river deltas, landslides and so on.
Their work by Chandeshwar Misra, Venketesh T Ranganathan, and Ranjini Bandyopadhyay is supported by RRI, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Science and Engineering Research Council (Serbs) have been received in the Soft Matter journal published by the Royal Society of the Royal Chemistry.
“Water is a key component in any soft material that involves clay and artificial clay particles.
Understanding the influence of the water structure in the nature of colloidal dispersion of clay, therefore, it is very important.
For this purpose, the researchers use laponiteclay dispersions subject to colloids As a model system to understand the properties of the mixture of clay water, “said RRI.
The researchers found that the water structure in the mixture of clay water, known as aqueous colloidal clay dispersion, affected mechanics, aging – the accumulation of sample elasticity spontaneously due to the formation of microscopic colloid structures – and structural properties.
“The team explained that Clay Colloid obtained electricity costs when mixed or dissolved in water and aqueous dispersion produced showed an interesting behavior called aging.
Because the sodium ion that is on the surface of the clay particles comes out into water, clay particles in dispersion become increasingly negative It is charged over time.
The results of strong osmotic pressure gradients, and clay disperses automatically change or age from a soft state of solid state due to electrostatic interactions between clay particles, “RRI said.
The researchers said their experiments involving an incorporation of external additives showed a strong influence of the medium structure dispersion on the dispersion properties when interparticle electrostatic interactions were weak.
“We introduced a new temperature dependent measurement protocol, where the medium temperature was repaired before adding clay particles, to manipulate hydrogen bonds in watery media in the absence of external fair.
Accelerated aging, observed when increasing the temperature regardless of experimental thermal history, associated with Increased electrostatic interaction interparticle as in room temperature experiments with ionic additives, “their paper rang.
This study identified that with weak interparticle electrostatic interactions, changes in the physicochemical properties of clay dispersed can be driven by manipulating the population of hydrogen bonds in runny media.
RRI said that when research on clay colloids that was accused of being carried out for decades, this was the first time that the systematic inquiry of the role of the water structure in the physicochemical properties of clay colloid dispersion was imposed.
The team won control of the population of hydrogen bonds in the water media by adding two types of molecules – cosmotrop, or structural enhancers, and chaotrop, which is a structural breaker.
They found a clear correlation between the water structure and dispersion properties.