Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Silica is a basic raw material that is widely used in many industrially important products such as electronics, ceramic, pharmaceutics, detergents, adhesives and polymer materials. The sources such as rice husk, groundnut shell, almond shell, bamboo leaves and sugarcane bagasse are considered as a waste material. These waste materials in large quantities can create a serious environmental problem. At harvesting time, these waste materials are burnt to release nutrients for the next growing season and to get rid of the huge quantity of it. During burning, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen elements which are present in these waste materials are converted into flammable gases such as carbon monoxide, hydrogen, methane and ash. Combustion of the almond shell produces almond shell ash, which consists of mainly silica and carbon. In this study, almond shells are subjected to moisture removal in a hot plate and sintered 450 OC, 700 OC and 900 OC by thermal methods for 10, 8 and 7 h, respectively. The sintered powder was treated with 1 M NaOH to form sodium silicate. In a systematic study, results demonstrated that almond shell produced amorphous silica (SiO2). The prepared silica was characterized by FT-IR, XRD and SEM analysis. FT-IR results showed a good peak correlation between the commercial silica and burnt almond shell residue.