From nanostructured palygorskite to advanced functional materials in China

Palygorskite (Pal) is a layered-chain clay mineral characterized by unique onedimensional nanorod crystals, regular nanochannels, and abundant surface active groups.Since the discovery of Pal in China in 1976, Chinese scientists have resolved the key bottleneck of efficient disaggregation of rod crystal bundles restricting its high-value utilization, and achieved a fundamental transformation of Pal from a traditional raw mineral material to advanced functional nanomaterial.The applications of Pal in China have been expanded into diverse fields, including energy materials, antibacterial agents, catalysts, tissue engineering scaffolds, hydrogen storage materials, membrane separation materials, functional coatings, pigments, etc.In the case of natural abundant mixed-dimensional Pal clay with complex mineral compositions, full-mineral synchronous utilization technology is developed for the fabrication of functional materials based on the differences and complementarities in