CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The present work deals on the use of different procedures to obtain valuable sub-products of rice husk. Several one-step (acid and alkaline) and multi-step (combined) chemical treatments and also incineration were selected for that purpose. Each sub-product were characterized after every step by means of chemical composition (mainly based on thermogravimetric analysis, TGA and Fourier transformed infrared spectra, FTIR) and morphology (visual observations and scanning electron microscopy, SEM). The results clearly showed that whereas one-step processes are able to remove organic components (mostly hemicellulose, lignin and waxes); multi-step ones give the possibility to eliminate 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 sub-product can be used as additive and fillers in a very wide range of applications.