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Internally displaced persons are those that have a well-founded fear of persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group, and have moved from one part of the country to a new host location, as 'they cannot return home or are afraid to do so' (UNHCR, 2017, p.1). With social enterprises being praised for their ability to develop bottom-up, demand-driven approaches in reaching their target groups in a financially sustainable manner (Di Domenico, et al., 2010), they can potentially be an alternative to the top-down relief approach for solving complex economic and social problems of internally displaced populations in war and conflict zones (Paresashvili & Erkomaishvili, 2016; Džunić et al., 2018; Milovanović and Maksimović, 2018).

Recently, SiC single crystal growth has been of interest for the development of an alternative semiconducting material. The aim of this study was to purify and grow β-SiC particles for use as a single crystal source. First, a β-SiC powder with a particle size of about 10 μm and a purity of 99·5% was prepared from a phenyl-containing silica sol. Then, three different of heat treatment process were applied to grow the β-SiC particles and evaluate the effects of heat-treatment time and temperature. After three thermocycling processes carried out from 1850 to 2000°C in 1 h, the β-SiC particles had diameters over 100 μm because of a vaporisation–recrystallisation process that accelerated the β-SiC particle growth. Moreover, the thermocycling process improved the purity of β-SiC by eliminating metallic impurities.