The Rietveld analysis of X-ray powder diffraction patterns is used widely for obtaining the structural information of clay minerals. However, the complex hydration behavior and the variability of interlayer contents are often considered difficult to be described correctly by a simple structure model. In the present work, the use of Cu-triethylenetetramine (Cu-trien)-exchanged nontronites has been proposed to simplify the interlayer structure. This method provides a potential to obtain the structural information of nontronites, for example, the layer charge density, occupancies of cis-octahedral sites, and the iron content by the Rietveld analysis from the X-ray powder diffraction patterns. The approach was demonstrated on three Cu-trien-exchanged nontronite samples. The Rietveld refinements were carried out first on the purified samples and the results showed a good peak fitting between measured and calculated patterns. The refined iron content and the occupancies of cis-octahedral sites are in general agreement with the reference data, which have been obtained from chemical and thermal analyses. The refinement of layer charge density showed lower values compared with the reference. It may be due to the assumption of temperature factor of Cu-trien in the interlayer. A raw sample with natural impurities was chosen to test the applicability of this method. The refinement pattern of the raw sample led to good agreement with the observed data. The results of the iron content and the occupancies of cis-octahedral sites showed the same tendency as purified samples. This study showed that this approach allows for obtaining some structural details of nontronites directly from X-ray powder diffraction patterns of Cu-trien-exchanged samples.
Keywords: Cu-triethylenetetramine; Rietveld refinement; X-ray powder diffraction; crystal structure; nontronites.