Effect of activation on swelling property in Ca-bentonite

Compacted bentonite is attracting greater attention as buffer material for deep geological repository of high-level radioactive waste under current design concept. Swelling behavior is a significant property in achieving the low-permeability sealing function. The potential buffer material used is a locally available clayey material known as Zhisin clay in Taiwan. Zhisin clay is a Ca-type bentonite. Experimental data indicated that the swelling potential of Zhisin clay is much lower than that of Na-bentonite due to its exchangeable cation type and capacity. To enhance the swelling potential of Zhisin clay, a cation exchange process by addition of Na2CO3 powder is introduced in this research. Addition of Na2CO3 reagent to Zhisin clay caused precipitation of CaCO3 to occur and induced a replacement of Ca2+ ions by Na+ ions on the surface of bentonite in liquid phase. Experimental results show that Na2CO3-activated Zhisin clay is superior in swelling potential to untreated Zhisin clay. Due to the ion exchange hysteresis, activated bentonite shows different type of time-swell curve from traditional sigmoid-shaped curve. The optimal amount of Na2CO3 addition is found to be 1%, and the maximum swelling strain was found to be 3 times as much as that of untreated Zhisin clay. The Na2CO3 -activated Zhisin clay exhibited improved resistance to thermal environments and behaved similar to the Na-type bentonites under different hydrothermal temperatures. (authors)