Abstract

As the first step of study on fabrication of ceramic powders from phytoliths in rice, especially in rice husks, pulverization method of rice husks and the properties of milled rice husks were investigated. Impact methods, such as ball milling, were not meaningful for pulverizing elastic and thin fabric structure of rice husks. The most effective one was cutting method. In the present work, a rotating knife cutting method was applied to pulverizing rice husks. A 40-mesh screen was inserted under the rotating knives. The most portion of the milled powder was found in -50/+100 mesh section. Morphology of the milled rice husks revealed that the husks larger than 70 mesh were flake-like shape, at -70/+100 mesh section relatively equi-axed shape, at -170/+325 mesh section rod-like shape, and below 325 mesh section dust-like shape. Tap density of raw rice husks was about 0.1 g/cm3, while those of milled rice husks were over 0.4 g/cm3. This meant that, for a given volume of reactor, raw material charge can be increased more that 4 times when using milled rice husks than unmilled one. True densities of unmilled and milled rice husks were higher than 1.4 g/cm3, and increased with decreasing milled sizes.