3. Obtaining synthetic nanotalcs

Mineral synthesis has been used in research laboratories for some fifty years, enabling a wide variety of minerals to be obtained under widely varying conditions of pressure, temperature and synthesis time. The quantities of products obtained are often in the order of milligrams, and are used solely to obtain better crystallographic and crystallochemical definitions, which are difficult to obtain on non-pure natural materials, in association with other minerals. What's more, the chemical starting compounds used are very pure and very expensive. Aware that one of the interests of Rio Tinto Minerals from the outset was large-scale production, efforts were made to select the chemical starting compounds.

The synthesis protocol (3 patents filed ) consists in reacting sodium metasilicate (source of silicon) and metal chloride (in this case magnesium)...