Particle Size Analysis of Different Clay Types

Clay is a distinctive earth material that able to find from various locations on the earth while having a series of diverse applications because of the unique physical and chemical properties of clays foremost of the high porosity and less permeability although the properties may be varied with the origin and formation. The analysis of the particle size distribution is an essential aspect before most of applications especially for the filtering purposes and such kind of objectives were the foundation for current study. There were collected anthill clay, brick clay and roof tile clay samples from different regions in Sri Lanka. The separated portions of each sample were oven dried for approximately 24 hours under the temperature of 1100C until the mass was becoming constant. Some representative samples from each dried clay sample were separated for moisture content investigation, wet sieve analysis and dry sieve analysis. The dried clay samples were manually crushed before putting into the sieve set. As the results for the moisture contents there were obtained 15.49% for anthill clay, 21.45% for brick clay and 25.97% for roof tile clay. According to the wet sieve analysis there were obtained the finer percentage (<0.075mm) as 59.9%, 37.36% and 72.38% in order to anthill clay, brick clay and roof tile clay while distributing the portions of coarse particles of each clay type in the size range between 0.075mm-2mm that mostly composed sand particles. In the dry sieve analysis there were mainly observed some balanced distributions of particle sizes of clays in the size range between 0.037mm-2mm while having the finer portions (<0.037mm) of clay particles as 2.20%, 1.42% and 1.47% accordingly roof tile clay, brick clay and anthill clay. As the results for the overall investigation the relatively higher finer clay portion was found from roof tile clay.