Preparation of SiC from Rice Husk: Past, Present, and Future

In our previous work, we could produce silicon carbide from raw rice husk in thermal plasma. The plasma processing was performed in a very short time period of a few minutes. This is a significant improvement over the processes carried out earlier to produce SiC from rice husk. However, there are certain problems associated with the processing of rice husk. The raw rice husk contains a considerable amount of volatiles. The post-processing techniques employed to obtain reasonable pure SiC are not environmentally benign. In this article, we have suggested a possible solution to overcome the problem. A few more valuable products, namely, nano-silica and nano graphite in the form of graphene may also be obtained as a by-product.