Advanced ecomaterials based on functional clar nanoarchitectures

Oral presentation given at the International Conference on Applied Mineralogy & Advanced Materials, held in Castellaneta Marina (Italy) on June 7-12th, 2015.Clay minerals are exceptionally abundant and widely distributed raw materials in Nature. They have been used since antiquity in pottery and building elements as for instance adobe, bricks and tiles. Currently, this natural resource attracts a great interest in view to prepare advanced nanostructured materials contributing at the same to reduce environmental impact. Clays, by themselves, and most of clay derivatives, are safe materials useful for multipurpose applications in strategic sectors ranging from energy storage to biomedical uses under nanotechnology approaches. Beside, the use of clay-based nanostructured materials for detection and removal of pollutants from air, water and soils is becoming a topic of increasing research activity. Functional nanoarchitectures based on silicate clays of different composition and structure, showing layered, tubular or fibrous morphologies, have been designed in view to applications as adsorbents, catalysts, membranes, gas-barriers, polymer-clay nanocomposites, electrical and electrochemical devices, photoactive systems or even as additives for vaccines and non-viral vectors for gene delivery and transfection of last generation. Assuming that advanced technologies will require in a near future the use of low cost, widely distributed and no-pollutant resources such as clays and other abundant raw ecomaterials, recent examples of advanced materials based on smectite type, such as montmorillonite, or prepared from fibrous clays such as sepiolite, will be introduced and discussed here. It will be shown, for instance, applications on materials based on clays as superparamagnetic adsorbents, supported graphenes and materials for biomedical purposes, which have been developed in our laboratory in recent past years