What Is Zeolite Powder And How Are They Obtained?
1. Introduction
Zeolite powder is widely believed and proven to have good health benefits, specifically as a detoxifying agent.
Zeolite has health supplement is gaining rapid popularity worldwide due to this.
Apart from use as personal hygiene product, zeolites are also used in commercial industries for their unique properties.
One example is zeolite’s use as catalyst for chemical reactions, making it an important ingredient for chemical industry.
2. Zeolite Formation
The term zeolite comes from the Greek language, meaning ‘boiling stone’.
That is because zeolites are literally formed from mixing of boiling lava and/or volcanic rock and salt water.
They need to be processed for many years in order to form zeolites.
These naturally formed zeolite rocks are highly impure and contain large amount of undesirable mixtures.
These rocks need to be processed further before that are capable of consumption.
3. Processing of Zeolite Powder
Naturally formed zeolite rocks are shipped to zeolite processing units.
In there, zeolite rocks are crushed into zeolite rock powder.
Because zeolites are highly porous, they can be easily crushed down into powder with minimal effort.
The powdered zeolite form is then sent for purification, where impurities are removed and clean zeolite powder is obtained from them.
Many methods of purification are employed such as filtration.
Purified zeolites are then packed and shipped to wholesale clients who buy them up in bulk and package them individually to sell to customers.
4. Unique Properties of Zeolites
The unique properties of zeolites are due to the fact their structure has a lot of open spaces, giving them special capture properties.
Due to presence of open spaces, they can easily attract oppositely charged ions and lock these in their structure, making them perfect for heavy metal ions that have opposite charge as compared to zeolite molecules.
Toxins also have similar ions, allowing zeolites to pull them in when exposed to toxin-rich environment.
Zeolites are also used for water purification processes as they don’t dissolve in water.
They can easily pull in oppositely charged impurities from water, purifying the surroundings with ease.
During water purification methods, zeolites are used along with sedimentation for purification.