Composite ash from coal and rice husk co-firing plants: A model source to produce Molecular Sieve 4A

Abstract

Amongst the currently existing alternative renewable sources for energy production, biomass is a great focus of interest. Over the past few decades, the depletion of coal from natural reservoirs has created an alarming situation in India. Parallelly, the lack of concrete methodologies for the disposal of fly ash generated at these power plants is still a critical setback. To remediate, most majorly developing countries are adopting the route of combusting agro-waste with coal to generate energy. The post-combustion leftover at these power plants is referred to as composite ash expects to cause devastating impacts on the environment alike coal fly ash to a certain extent. On the contrary, Molecular Sieve 4A (MS 4A) or alumino-silicate resin emerged as a chart-topping product viz. that caters to a vital role in ion exchange, adsorbents, membranes, and catalysis due to its elite structural properties. Though, several attempts have been reported earlier to produce MS 4A using coal ash; the practical process is yet to be in commercial practice. The objective of the current paper is mainly focused on the eco-friendly pathway to synthesize MS 4A using composite ash samples pertaining to the variable ratio of rice husk to coal as feed and their corresponding effect on the physicochemical properties of zeolite samples. The investigation studied using XRD, SEM, IR, and Particle size analyzer evidently indicates a significant resemblance of composite ash sourced MS 4A samples with the commercial standard.