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Utilization of biomass either as a renewable energy source or for the generation of biogenic materials has received considerable interest during the past years. In the case of rice husk (RH) and rice straw (RS) with high silica contents in the fuel ash, these approaches can be combined to produce high-grade biogenic silica with purities >98 wt % from combustion residues. The overall process can be considered nearly neutral in terms of CO2 emission and global warming, but it can also address disposal challenges of rice husk and rice straw. For the resulting biogenic silica, several advanced application opportunities exist, e.g., as adsorbents, catalysts, drug delivery systems, etc. This article provides a comprehensive literature review on rice husk and rice straw combustion as well as applied strategies for raw material pre-treatment and/or post-treatment of resulting ashes to obtain high quality biogenic silica. Purity of up to 97.2 wt % SiO2 can be reached by combustion of untreated material. With appropriate fuel pre-treatment and ash post-treatment, biogenic silica with purity up to 99.7 wt % can be achieved. Studies were performed almost exclusively at a laboratory scale.

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The effect of the temperature difference between the gas and the particles on propagation of premixed flames in a combustible mixture containing volatile fuel particles uniformly distributed in an oxidizing gas mixture is analyzed in this paper. It is presumed that the fuel particles vaporize first to yield a gaseous fuel, which is oxidized in the gas phase. The analysis is performed in the asymptotic limit, where the value of the characteristic Zel'dovich number is large, which implies that the reaction term in the preheating zone is negligible. Required relations between the gas and the particles are derived from equations for premixed flames of organic dust. Subsequently, the governing equations are solved by an analytical method. Finally, the variation of the dimensionless temperatures of the gas and the particles, the mass fraction of the particles, the equivalence ratio φ g as a function of φ u , the flame temperature, and the burning velocities of the gas and the particles are obtained. The analysis shows that the calculated value of φ g is smaller than unity for certain cases, even though φ u 1.

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