Loading…

Do Aqueous Suspensions of Smectite Clays Form a Smectic Liquid-Crystalline Phase?

Bottom-up strategies for the production of well-defined nanostructures often rely on the self-assembly of anisotropic colloidal particles (nanowires and nanosheets). These building blocks can be obtained by delamination in a solvent of low-dimensionality crystallites. To optimize particle availabili...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Langmuir 2022-12, Vol.38 (48), p.14563-14573
Main Authors: El Rifaii, Karin, Wensink, Henricus H., Dozov, Ivan, Bizien, Thomas, Michot, Laurent J., Gabriel, Jean-Christophe P., Breu, Josef, Davidson, Patrick
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Bottom-up strategies for the production of well-defined nanostructures often rely on the self-assembly of anisotropic colloidal particles (nanowires and nanosheets). These building blocks can be obtained by delamination in a solvent of low-dimensionality crystallites. To optimize particle availability, determination of the delamination mechanism and the different organization stages of anisotropic particles in dispersion is essential. We address this fundamental issue by exploiting a recently developed system of fluorohectorite smectite clay mineral that delaminates in water, leading to colloidal dispersions of single-layer, very large (≈20 μm) clay sheets at high dilution. We show that when the clay crystallites are dispersed in water, they swell to form periodic one-dimensional stacks of fluorohectorite sheets with very low volume fraction (
ISSN:0743-7463
1520-5827
DOI:10.1021/acs.langmuir.2c01821