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Na-montmorillonite is a natural clay mineral and is available in abundance innature. The aqueous dispersions of charged and anisotropic platelets of thismineral exhibit non-ergodic kinetically arrested states ranging from softglassy phases dominated by interparticle repulsions to colloidal gelsstabilized by salt induced attractive interactions. When the salt concentrationin the dispersing medium is varied systematically, viscoelasticity and yieldstress of the dispersion show non-monotonic behavior at a critical saltconcentration, thus signifying a morphological change in the dispersionmicrostructures. We directly visualize the microscopic structures of thesekinetically arrested phases using cryogenic scanning electron microscopy. Weobserve the existence of honeycomb-like network morphologies for a wide rangeof salt concentrations. The transition of the gel morphology, dominated byoverlapping coin (OC) and house of cards (HoC) associations of clay particlesat low salt concentrations to a new network structure dominated by face-facecoagulation of platelets, is observed across the critical salt concentration.We further assess the stability of these gels under gravity usingelectroacoustics. This study, performed for concentrated clay dispersions for awide concentration range of externally added salt, is useful in ourunderstanding of many geophysical phenomena that involve the salt inducedaggregation of natural clay minerals.

Effect of electrolyte on the microstructure and yielding of aqueous dispersions of colloidal clay