“…However, because of the high silicon content in RH, its utilization has been significantly widened in the past few decades. At present, RH and especially rice husks ashes (RHA) obtained after controlled burning of rice husks are the raw materials for the production of a series of silicon-based materials (Sun & Gong, 2001;Mishra et al, 1986;Della et al, 2002;Watari et al, 2003), including silica (James & Rao, 1986;Kalapathy et al, , 2002Zaky et al, 2008), activated carbon (Watari et al, 2006;Kalderis et al, 2008), sodium silicate Sekar & Virutha, 2005), silicon tetrachloride (Basu et al, 1973;Seo et al, 2003), sodium silicofluoride (Sun & Gong, 2001) and silanes (Acharya et al, 1980;Nandi et al, 1991). The high reactivity and purity of RHA makes it an ideal starting material/silica source for preparing advanced materials like sialon (Sun & Gong, 2001;Rahnman & Saleh, 1995), silicon carbide (Krishnarao et al, 1998;Rodriguez-Lugo et al, 2002;Sujirote & Leangsuwan, 2003), silicon nitride (Kumar & Godkhindi, 1996;Real et al, 2004), cordierite (Sun & Gong, 2001;S.…”