I have been following your work now for a couple of years and are mainly concerned with the toxic waste field and the potential application of Geopolymeric binders towards a toxic waste solution. I will also be writing up a Ph.D on this subject within the next year. As I did not have a lot of contact with other people in this field, there are various fundamentals about geopolymer chemistry that is still only vaguely explained as far as I am concerned. In many instances it took a lot of reading in the fields of geology, chemistry (silica) and zeolite syntheses to be able to comprehend and quantitatively describe precisely what is meant by the term geopolymerization in relation to the exact starting materials that one uses.
I have also read almost everything that you have written (including patents).
A fair amount of experimental work has also been done and will be published from now on. There are, however, certain aspects that I would like to discuss in order to better understand the fundamental side of geopolymerization as well as certain terminology that is not entirely clear to me.
What I meant is that you would not have heard or seen anything that we have done because we have not published up to now, it is only now that we feel confident enough to maybe publish something, although there are many things that we still don’t understand. A couple of people in Spain (Palomo et. al.) have published some material where they tried to quantified the microstructure of geopolymers, they also quoted you extensively. They proved that the order of addition of components influence strength in a big way. Again there is no explanation given why this is so?
The fact that the order of addition of components does influence strength is exemplified in my early patents (1979-1980, US 4,349,386 col. 4, lines 29-50).
The fundamentals of geopolymerization are described in my recent book (200) Geopolymer Chemistry & Applications, Chapters 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
Prof. Joseph Davidovits
