Study on Wet Method Mechanism for Producing Tronoh's Silica Sand Fine Particles

There are abundant of silica sand found at Tronoh around the area of Universiti Teknologi
PETRONAS, yet there is less effort for commercializing these silica sand in both technical
and research application. The need to produce silica sand fme particles in various processes
has increased tremendously. Thus, the objective of this project is producing and
characterizing Tronoh's silica sand fine particles from wet method by ball milling using
particle size analyser (Mastersizer), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Field Emission
Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM), X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), X-Ray Fluorescent
(XRF) and Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX). The scope of study ofthis project is to produce
Tronoh's silica sand fine particles using wet method by ball milling while characterizing the
properties of materials formed using characterization equipment. It is based on both research
and laboratory experiments, in which main equipment involved such as ball mill machine,
sieve shaker and oven. The methodology of this project commences when silica sand is being
taken at the entrance ofUniversiti Teknologi PETRONAS. The silica sand then being meshed
with different of mesh sizes using sieve shaker until getting silica sand size <600um. The
grinding process begins by mixing silica sand, water and grinding media to form slurry and
grind it using ball mill. After that, silica sand is dried in an oven to remove water and
moisture. The process of sieving, grinding and drying continue about 6 hours alternately until
getting silica sand fine particles. From all these characterization equipment, the particle size
distribution, particles morphology, crystalline structure, crystalline size, chemical
composition and element mapping of silica sand fine particles can be determined. The results
show that, as grinding duration increased, the particles size distribution of silica sand
decreased, morphology structure changed, crystalline structure remained same with
decreasing of crystalline size while composition of Si02 increased and both weight and
atomic percent of Si element decreased. These characteristics of silica sand fine particles are
very imperative both for commercialization and advance research. I believe that my final year
project will be beneficial to both UTP and industry.