The Effects of Hydrochloric Acid Pretreatment on Different Types of Clay Minerals

Abstract

Clay minerals are common in geological samples and are useful paleoclimate and sediment provenance proxies. Acid pretreatment is the most common method for the separation and purification of clay minerals. Given that hydrochloric acid (HCl) can dissolve chlorite and distinguish it from kaolinite, the HCl digestion method is used to simplify the routine method of clay mineral analysis. However, there have been few studies of the effects of acid digestion on different clay minerals in the context of extracting paleoclimate indicators. In this study, we used illite, chlorite, kaolinite, and two types of smectite to assess the effects of pretreatment with different HCl concentrations at variable temperatures. Our results show that chlorite is the most soluble clay mineral in HCl and can be effectively dissolved in HCl with concentrations of >1 N. The variable crystal structure of smectite affects its solubility in HCl. Ca-rich smectite, which has more cation substitution of octahedral Al, can be dissolved with HCl. However, Na-rich smectite, which has less cation substitution for octahedral Al, is hardly dissolved in HCl of any concentration or at any temperature. Illite can be partly dissolved in HCl, and the threshold beyond which dissolution occurs is 5 N HCl at 70 °C. Kaolinite is relatively difficult to dissolve in HCl. Given that the HCl digestion method uses the peak intensity of the bulk sample X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, whereas the routine method uses the peak area of clay particles, we compared the results of clay mineral quantification and the paleoclimate proxy obtained using the two methods for synthetically prepared mixed and natural clay samples. The results obtained with the HCl digestion method are less accurate than those obtained with the routine method because of the dissolution of illite and smectite in HCl. Therefore, the HCl pretreatment method is not suitable for clay mineral analysis in paleoclimate studies. The present results provide reference data for future studies that employ the acid dissolution pretreatment of clay mineral samples to acquire and quantify paleoclimate proxies.