Extraction of High-Quality Silica from a Plant Using a Simple Method

Silica occupies an increasingly important place in scientific research, mainly due to its easy preparation and wide applications in various industries, such as catalysis, pigments, pharmaceuticals, electronics, ceramics, polymeric materials, thin film substrates, thermal insulators and moisture sensors. Silica is the second most abundant element on the earth's surface, accounting for around 32% of its total weight. Consequently, plants rooted in the soil always contain some silicon in their tissues. The nature of amorphous silica in plants (plants with a high silica content) means that it can be extracted at a lower temperature, and therefore provides a low-energy method as an alternative to current high-energy silica extraction methods. Among these methods an acidification method is applied in our case to extract silica from a plant. So the first part is to collect, sort and clean properly our plant before being burnt in a muffle furnace at 630⁰c to produce an ash powder in a first step then this powder was synthesized into silica by a chemical attack of nitric acid HNO₃ with a well determined concentration to form a silica powder. The physico-chemical characteristics of the synthesized powder were analyzed by X-ray diffraction and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), with the result that the silica powder has an amorphous structure.