Abstract
This work was carried out on sediments in the Iraqi- Tigris river within the city of Baghdad. Three locations were taken from the Tigris river. The first is at the entrance to Baghdad City (Al-Muthanna Bridge), the second in central Baghdad (Adhamiya) and the third at the end of Baghdad (Diyala Jisr).The specimens were taken from the banks of the Tigris river at 1.5 meters from the edge of the water and a depth of 2 meter. The sediments contain in the three locations have a slight difference in concentrations of compounds. Sediments formed mainly from silica, which concentrations were between 59 - 66%. Therefore, the study focused on extracting the pure silicon element from these sediments.The extraction process of silicon from the sediments was performed in two stages. The first is pyrometallurgy stage, in which the reduction of silica was performed by mixing pure aluminum powder with sediments at different mixing ratio (1:1, 1.5:1 and 2:1) sediments/aluminum and at temperatures (900 - 950 and 1000)° C. The second stage was hydrometallurgy, which involved chemical reduction using at different concentrations (3,4 and 5M) of sulfuric acid to obtain silicon element with purity, 98. 9%. The efficiency of extracted silicon from sediments of Tigris river is ≥ (88%).
