Processing parameters in improving purity weight percentage of local silica sand

Abstract

Malaysia produced its silica that are being sought after for advances applications such as glass making. Presently, being the world’s sixth largest exporter of processed silica sand, Malaysia is gifted with abundance with silica sand reserves and has approximately 148.4 million tonnes silica sand estimated by Department of Mineral and Geoscience Malaysia (JMG). In the year 2018, the global silica sand market was worth approximately USD7.4 billion and is projected to reach USD10.5 billion by year 2024. In this study, silica samples were supplied by Terengganu Silica Consortium (TSC), a local silica sand developer. The objective is to increase the purity of silica sand that meets the international standard for glass making industry by using mechanical ball milling technique. Through this technique, the extracted sand will be crushed through different variables of ball milling parameters, that are round per minutes (rpm) and machine usage time. The refined samples then were analysed using XRD and XRF to measure the percentage of silica. Characterisation with SEM reveals the effect on size reduction and morphology. Findings from study contribute to increase GDP in Malaysia through export of silica. In the year 2019, the export of silica sand in Malaysia is valued at RM120 million and is projected to increase in post pandemic era. From the results and analysis in this in study, it shows that the best optimization parameters for a fixed milling time at one hour with milling speed at 100 Revolutions Per Minute (RPM) and also a fixed weight of sand is through the usage of 20 milling balls, with representing Ball to Powder weight Ratio (BPR) of 10:1. For the 20 milling balls, the method succeeded in increasing the purity of silica from raw silica sand (85.37%) by +12.56%.