CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In this work several treatments were used to produce rice husk sub products with added value by separating inorganic and lignocellulosic components. Several one-step (acid and alkaline) and multi-step (combined) chemical treatments and also incineration were selected for that purpose. Different techniques (mainly FTIR, TGA and SEM) were employed in order to determine the effect of each treatment on the chemical structure and morphology of original rice husk. The results clearly show that whereas one-step processes are able to remove organic components (mostly hemicellulose, lignin and waxes); multi-step ones give the possibility to separate silica in the first step and then to purify the resultant material until cellulose production. On the other hand, burning produced almost pure amorphous silica. All acquired subproduct can be used as additive and fillers in a very wide range of applications.