What is activated carbon?

Have you ever heard of carbon cloths or carbon cloths? To understand these two materials, we can first look at the appearance of both.

Activated carbon and hard carbon seem to be just small black particles or powder, in fact, they are not simple, and the performance is very different.

Activated carbon is a kind of porous material, and porous materials have special properties and application space. According to the pore size, the pores on the porous material can be divided into micropores, mesoporous pores and large pores.

● Microhole: aperture <2nm

● Mesoporous: aperture 2nm-50nm

● Large hole: aperture >50nm

1mm=1000000nm, if according to the thickness of a hair 0.1mm, that is, 100000nm, then the diameter of the hair is 2000 times that of a 50nm mesopore.

The pores on the porous material are very small, but the quantitative change causes the qualitative change, and the abundant pores make the material have a large specific surface area. "Specific surface area" is generally expressed in terms of the surface area of an object per unit mass.

As a porous material, the specific surface area of activated carbon can reach 1000-3000㎡/g. Isn't it amazing how much surface area you can have on a 1g object?

They are all related to carbon, but the raw materials used, manufacturing processes, and application areas are different.

From the point of view of characteristics, porous materials have good adsorption, one is physical adsorption - due to the molecular dispersion and electrostatic effect between the solid porous material and the gas or liquid adsorbent, and the other is chemical adsorption - due to the chemical reaction between the molecules of the porous material and the adsorbent.

Therefore, people use activated carbon to make carbon cloth of air purifier filter screen to play the role of adsorption and filtration.

See: What is carbon cloth? What is carbon cloth?

In addition, activated carbon can also be used in the field of energy storage as a supercapacitor electrode material.

In addition to the number of pores, the form of activated carbon is also diverse, not only the common black small particles or powder, but including powder, broken, columnar, spherical, cloth (carbon fiber cloth), felt (carbon fiber felt) and so on.