New Condition Mineral Processing Plant Extraction of Silica from Palm

Silicon dioxide (SiO2) or commonly known as silica is one of the basic materials and the valuable inorganic multipurpose chemical compounds. Silica is occurring naturally as quartz, sand or flint. It can exist in gel, crystalline and amorphous forms. It is the most abundant material on the earth’s crust. Nowadays, most silica was produced from quartz or sand by the extraction process. Sodium silicate, the precursor for silica production is currently manufactured by smelting quartz sand with sodium carbonate at 13000C .From this production of silica, it will be used to fulfil the requirement in its major applications such as for ceramic product, electronic component and additive in concrete. However, manufacturing of pure silica is energy intensive.

Silica also can be found in agricultural waste such as palm ash. The large amount of this waste can be a new source of silica production for this country. For example, According to the Malaysian Palm Oil Board, the amount of palm ash produce in Malaysia approximately 3 million tons. Even though the production of silica from the agricultural wastes are not much compared to the production from quartz or sand, it is still can be used to fulfil the industrial demands.

Leaching treatment is a proper route to extract the silica. Sulphuric acid (H2SO4), hydrochloric acid (HCl) and nitric acid (HNO3) solutions are conventionally used in leaching treatment to prepare silica materials. Beside hazardous to the environment and humans, the strong acid leaching treatment also has an economical problem due to a necessary use of expansive materials with corrosion resistance to strong acid and a special disposal treatment of used strong acids.The objective of this Process was to study the possibility in developing a method to extract and characterized raw silica from palm ash using organic acid leaching method.