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Performance and Selection of Activated Carbon
  • DATA:2020-05-07

Activated carbon is a kind of carbon product with developed pore structure and specific surface area, which is processed through physical or chemical methods using high-quality bituminous coal, wood and various nut shells as raw materials. Due to the unique void structure of activated carbon, it has extremely strong adsorption capacity. Hence, it is widely used in both industrial and commercial applications such as air purification, anti-virus protection, water treatment, solvent de-colorization and so on. Although there are many varieties of activated carbon in forms and applications, activated carbon has a common characteristic, which is "adsorption".
 
The reason why activated carbon has adsorption is because it possesses a developed pore structure. Like sponge we have seen, under the same weight conditions, a sponge can absorb more water than other objects, and the reason is that it has developed pore structure. But the pore structure of activated carbon is invisible to the naked eye, because they are not much larger than a molecule.
The degree of development of activated carbon pores is unimaginable. If one gram of activated carbon is taken and all the pore walls are expanded into a flat surface, this area will reach 1000 square meters (that is, the specific surface area is 1000g / m2). The main factor affecting the adsorption of activated carbon depends on the development of the internal pore structure.
 
In the production process, the way to improve the adsorption performance of activated carbon is to control the production process so that the pore structure of activated carbon is increased as much as possible in a unit volume. Therefore, activated carbon with higher adsorption capacity contains a lot of pores, which makes its density lower. This is why the activated carbon with better adsorption performance feels lighter. (The premise is that it is produced from the same raw material and has not been immersed in water or adsorbed other substances).
 
At the same time, the production cost of activated carbon will increase with the increase of the adsorption, and it will increase geometrically. In order to unify standards and make production controllable, iodine adsorption value or carbon tetrachloride adsorption value (CTC) is usually used to calibrate the adsorption value of activated carbon in the activated carbon industry. With a higher adsorption value, the adsorption capacity of activated carbon will also increase as well.