What Is Bentonite
The main component of bentonite, an absorbent swelling clay, is montmorillonite. In its capacity as a swelling clay, bentonite can take in a lot of water, swelling up to an eight-fold increase in volume. Because of this, bentonite beds are unfit for use in buildings and paving roads. Yet, drilling mud and groundwater sealants take advantage of the swelling property. Bentonite is a valuable adsorbent since it increases the clay's overall surface area to a very high level. When moist, the plates stick to one another as well. The cohesiveness that results from this makes the clay suitable for use as a binder and an additive to enhance the plasticity of kaolinite clay used for pottery.

What Is Sodium Bentonite
When saturated with water, sodium bentonite swells and can absorb up to several times its dry bulk. It is frequently used in drilling mud for oil and gas wells as well as boreholes for geotechnical and environmental research because of its excellent colloidal characteristics. Because of its tendency to swell, sodium bentonite is also helpful as a sealant since it creates a low-permeability, self-sealing barrier. For instance, it is used to line the bottom of landfills. In several rheological or sealing applications in the geoenvironmental, sodium bentonite has had various surface changes.

As fertilizer prills, sodium bentonite, and elemental sulfur can be mixed. These allow for the slow oxidation of sulfur to sulfate, a plant nutrient required for some crops, such as onions or garlic, which synthesize numerous organo-sulfur compounds and maintain sulfate levels in rainfall-leached soil for a longer period of time than either pure powdered sulfur or gypsum. Organic farming has employed sulfur/bentonite pads with additional organic fertilizers.

What Is Calcium Bentonite
A helpful adsorbent of ions in solution as well as fats and oils is calcium bentonite. It is the primary component of fuller's earth, which is likely among the oldest industrial cleaning products. Compared to sodium bentonite, it has a substantially lower capacity for swelling.

By using an ion exchange technique, calcium bentonite can be transformed into sodium bentonite, which then exhibits several of sodium bentonite's features. This involves mixing wet bentonite with 5–10% of soluble sodium salt, such as sodium carbonate, and then waiting for the ion exchange to occur and for water to remove the exchanged calcium. There may be some differences between sodium-beneficiated calcium bentonite's and natural sodium bentonite's properties, such as viscosity and fluid loss of suspensions.

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