Clay/Non-Ionic Surfactant Hybrid Nanocomposites

This chapter gives an overview of the structural and chemical physical properties of nanocomposites formed by clay minerals and surfactants, which represent a class of materials with promising features for applications in different industrial, biomedical, and environmental applications. Due to their non-toxicity and biocompatibility, a great deal of attention is nowadays devoted to the study of non-ionic surfactants. Among them, block copolymers represent a combination of the properties of common amphiphilic molecules and long polymer chains. These macromolecules can form a great variety of supra-molecular structures generated from self-organization phenomena in aqueous media. Nanostructures might be obtained from the interaction between polymeric or conventional non-ionic surfactants and clays, with novel properties different from those of the pure compounds. Thermodynamic and kinetic investigations, together with structural analysis, were powerful tools in elucidating the driving force involved in the interaction processes and in obtaining useful information for the employment of these hybrid materials.