Quantification of clay minerals from Meknes: Theory and application

A great number of fields are concerned with the determination of the quantity of clay minerals present in the soil and the rocks rich in clay, but this will run up against the difficulty of the operation and the lack of interesting research in the field. This difficulty is mainly due to the unique structure as well as the very variable chemical composition characterizing the clay minerals. In this review, we have discussed the most important mineral quantification techniques available, with a discussion of their advantages and disadvantages. The emphasis was put on the techniques based on X-ray diffraction (XRD), because they are the best known and most accurate and have been considerably improved in recent years following the development of specific computer processing systems. We are interested in single peak techniques (Mineral Intensity Factor (MIF), Reference Intensity Ratio (RIR)), and those based on the full pattern (Rietveld, full pattern summation). After that, we applied the XRD technique and the XRF technique for the quantification of the natural clay from Meknes. The results of quantification by XRD of the minerals constituting the natural clay from Meknes, show the dominance of quartz (66.83%), followed by an important quantity of illite (15.8%), then kaolinite (9.1%) and finally smectite (8.26%). While the results obtained by XRF application show that kaolinite is present with a small percentage (0.08%). The percentage of illite, smectite and quartz are, respectively, (26.32%), (5.04) et (68.56%).