How small can clay crystals be?

Friday 17th October 2014

These are table salt crystals on a 60 mesh insight-live.com/glossary/80">sieve. It has an opening of 250 micro meters (or microns). Half of the crystals passed this sieve, half are retained. Notice on the right, several crystals are in the openings, about to fall through. Imagine that a particle (or crystal) of bentonite or ball clay can be sub-micron in diameter, they can actually be 2500 times smaller on a side than these salt crystals! One-tenth-micron ultimate particles would thus fit 2500x2500 on the flat side of a salt crystal. And, since the clay crystal is much thinner than wide, perhaps ten could stack to the same dimension. That means theoretically 2500x2500x25000 (or 1 with eleven zeros) could pack into a grain of salt!

Pages that reference this post in the Digitalfire Reference Library:

Sieve, Ultimate Particles, Particle Size Distribution, Particle Sizes

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