jismart2023048: Development of Amorphous Rice Husk Ash for Sustainable Construction

Abstract

In the current era, industrial waste is getting great attention to be used as a cement replacement material. Owing to the difficulties in the disposal of biomass like rice husk (RH), the investigation into getting amorphous silica in large quantities from it not only reduces related landfill problems but also favours reducing the consumption of cement in our surroundings without compromising strength. Various investigations have been done on different methods of producing amorphous silica from rice husks by the combustion process. One of the popular methods is the acid leaching treatment of rice husk to remove harmful alkaline earth metals from rice husk, which promotes the crystallisation process of silica in the heating process. However, the leaching treatment should be investigated more, such as leaching temperature, acid concentration, leaching duration, and other factors effecting the leaching process, like grinding conditions. In this paper, investigations on different leaching conditions have been done with the help of a few characterizations, like FTIR, XRD, SEM, TGA, and XRD. The results conclude that the rice husk leached with a solution of 0.1M HCl at 600C for 90mins and burnt at 8000C, yielded pure silica with a 94.86% amorphous content.