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Harvesting silica nanoparticles from rice husks

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Abstract

Biogenic silica nanoparticles were synthesized using rice husks (RHs) as the raw material via controlled pyrolysis. The characterization results showed that the morphology of the synthesized silica was highly related to the pretreatment of RHs and the pyrolysis conditions. Particularly, potassium cations in RHs were found to catalyze the melting of silica, during which the amorphous silica were converted to crystalline phase. Two hours of pyrolysis at 700 °C appeared to be ideal to synthesize silica nanoparticles with a diameter of ca. 20–30 nm. Higher temperature and longer duration of pyrolysis led to undesired melting of silica nanoparticles, while too low a temperature cannot effectively remove carbonous residues. Such amorphous silica nanoparticles with narrow size distribution and high purity are expected to replace silica gel and fumed silica for various applications.

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Acknowledgments

This research was sponsored by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s P3 Award (SU-83508401). W.W. thanks the support by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No: 2011ZM0046), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 21176093). L.S. would like to thank the start-up fund and the Research Enhancement Grant from Texas State University-San Marcos, the Welch Foundation, and the US Department of Agriculture for partial support for this research. We would like to thank Prof. Kecheng Gong for valuable discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510640, China

    Weixing Wang, Ning Zhang & Chao Ma

  2. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry & Materials Science and Engineering Program, Texas State University—San Marcos, San Macros, TX, 78666, USA

    Jarett C. Martin & Luyi Sun

  3. Department of Chemistry, The University of Texas—Pan American, Edinburg, TX, 78539-2999, USA

    Aijie Han

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  1. Weixing Wang
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  2. Jarett C. Martin
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Correspondence to Weixing Wang or Luyi Sun.

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Wang, W., Martin, J.C., Zhang, N. et al. Harvesting silica nanoparticles from rice husks. J Nanopart Res 13, 6981–6990 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-011-0609-3

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