Production and Analysis of Agriculturally Bas...

Production and Analysis of Agriculturally Based Silicon Carbide with Improved Electrical Conductivity

Author Name : Aisha Parveen, Lini Mathew, Mohammad Tariq Siddiqui

ABSTRACT

Wastes from agriculture or sewage systems have several properties, such as huge volume, high humidity, and high organic composition. According to past studies, sugarcane extract, peanut shells and rice husks have high silicon content. Chemical conversion of biomass feedstock will enhance usage and provide value to agricultural waste. Thermochemical biomass conversion does include several possible roots to produce from the initial biomass feedstock useful fuels and chemicals. As structural materials, SiC ceramics have aroused a great deal of concerns in the electronics, machinery, and aviation industries because of their high thermal conductivity, low density, high electric field breakdown strength, high maximum current density, low co-efficient of thermal expansion, high elastic modulus, high power withstand capacity, large band gap etc. However, the applications of SiC ceramics are restricted by low field carrier mobility leading to low electrical conductivity, low yield, and unwanted presence of impurities.  The products of biomass pyrolysis include water, bio char (or more correctly a carbonaceous solid), oils or tars, and permanent gases including methane, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. Bio char has varied applications in almost all fields like mechanical, electronics, aviation, machinery etc. Further heating of bio char produced more effective product known as Silicon Carbide. SiC ceramics have aroused plenty of concerns Pyrolysis is the thermal Decomposition of biomass at elevated temperatures in an inert atmosphere This process has been carried out in Industrial Microwave oven and Argon gas is used to provide inert atmosphere. By this Process, Mixture of Agricultural wastes (in powder form) gets converted into Ashes, containing rich amount of silica in it. Sintering Process has been carried out in Vacuum heating furnace to combine SiC powder at high pressure and temperature to obtain solid SiC.

The problem of the low electrical conductivity can be overcome through designing and preparing composites reinforced with fibers, whiskers, or particles. The electrical conductivity of SiC matrix obviously increased with the addition of graphene particles. Short fibers reinforced ceramics have some advantages, such as lower costs and easy of production. Many research studies have indicated that SiC was employed as a second phase as a stabilizer. In the present study, graphene powder was doped into the SiC to improve the mechanical and electrical properties of the composites. Graphene fibers were considered due to their good electrical conductivity. Experiments will be conducted by varying three input parameters viz. Heating temperature, Heating time and Quantity of waste. Techniques like Taguchi Design are used for the Design of Experiments. The electrical conductivity of the obtained composite is analyzed so that improvement can be made by adding fibres or whiskers like graphene by Ball Milling Process.