Activated (activated) carbon is a porous substance that is obtained from various carbon-containing materials of organic origin.

1 gram of activated carbon, depending on the manufacturing technology, has a surface area of ​​500 to 1500 m² [surface area of ​​ordinary coal 50 m²].
The essence of the activation process consists in opening the pores in the closed state of the carbon material.

The starting materials for their production have a decisive influence on the pore structure. Activated carbons based on coconut shells are characterized by a greater proportion of micropores (up to 2 nm), based on coal - a greater proportion of mesopores (2-50 nm). A large proportion of macropores is characteristic of wood-based activated carbons (more than 50 nm).

Micropores are particularly well suited for the adsorption of small molecules and mesopores are particularly well suited for the adsorption of larger organic molecules.

* Coals must be treated with superheated steam 600 to 850 degrees. The structure should consist of two flasks, one of which is filled with raw materials (finely chopped birch firewood without bark, the less the better) water is poured into the other. Close the flask with the raw material as tightly as possible and put it on the fire. Burn until all the raw materials turn into coal. Next, take the second flask and connect it to the first (with coals) flask by means of a metal coil. Pour water into the second flask. Light a fire under a flask with water and a coil. In a flask with water, water will boil and steam along a coil, which will crack in the fire, enters the flask with still warm coals, thereby still heating up. To learn 1 part of coal, you need ~ 5 parts of birch raw materials.

* Get a container the size of a jar of coffee with a sealed metal lid. Take a few birch twigs, put them in a coffee can and put them on the fire. After the fire burns out, you need to wait for the coal to cool down. Pour the resulting charcoal onto cheesecloth, tie it with a bag and hold over water vapor for 5-10 minutes to activate the charcoal, as a result of such processing, it acquires a porous structure, and all pores are cleansed of all liquid and not very liquid substances. It is necessary to store the resulting coal in an airtight container, otherwise it will lose its properties.


Using this technique, it is possible to obtain activated carbon, of course, for an ideal activated carbon, a temperature of superheated water vapor is needed from 300 to 600 degrees. But there will be enough water for filtering.

* Trees are used to make activated carbon different breeds: beech, birch, pine, linden, oak, spruce, aspen, alder, poplar. In accordance with the listed order, the adsorbing capacity of coal made from these tree species. Tree trunks must not be more than 50 years old.

The wood must be cleaned of bark, bark and core. The logs prepared in this way are burned at the stake until the fire disappears. In the fire, glowing coals will be found in place of the wood.

Taking out coals from the fire, place them in a colander. After that, hot coals are treated with steam, for which you need to hold a colander over a bowl of boiling water. Do not put coals in water. When the coal has completely cooled down, you need to crush it and put it in storage. It should be stored in a closed container in a dry place, away from substances that emit gases or vapors. In air or in a place with high humidity, the adsorption properties of activated carbon are significantly reduced.

* Small sticks of birch, put in a frying pan, cover with a small layer of sand and keep on fire for two hours. You can do the same procedure over a fire in a jar.

> how to make activated carbon

What is activated carbon?

The first step is to figure out what is activated carbon?
Activated carbon is a porous substance, an absorbent, obtained from various carbon-containing materials of organic origin, that is, charcoal, shells of walnuts, hazelnuts, coconuts, coal coke, petroleum coke We are of course interested in the simplest, accessible and purest product. Therefore, further we will focus only on activated carbon, which can be obtained from wood.

What is activated carbon used for?

Activated carbon is used in medicine and industry. In medicine, it is used for various intestinal disorders, helps to cope with many types of poisoning, or at least significantly reduce the harmful effects of toxins on the body (including alcohol, chemical and radioactive).
In production, activated carbon is used in purification systems. Most of all air filters for gas masks, protective masks are made using activated carbon. Industrial and home filters for water purification are also made with activated carbon.

Activated carbon at home

It is quite simple to make activated charcoal yourself, but for internal use, this is certainly not the best idea, since charcoal can be bought at every pharmacy. But in order to make coal, for example, for filtering water or in the absence of industrial designs, making a filter for a gas mask yourself, this knowledge can come in handy. Moreover, the prices for coal in a pharmacy are not small and it will be expensive to make a large water filter from "pharmacy" coal.

It doesn't matter what you use (cans, barrels, pots, pans, gas burner or fire), the principle of making activated carbon at home or field conditions same. It consists of three stages: the first is the production of coal, the second is its "activation" and at the end is drying.

So, let's start making activated carbon.
First stage:
We take a container, for example a wide tin can. The can should be tightly closed with something. It is desirable that the can be flat, that is, that its width (diameter) is greater than its height. Several small holes of 1-2 mm need to be made in the bottom of the can. Next, we put small dry, wooden chocks in the jar, close the lid tightly and put on the fire. It is better to make wooden chocks from wood that does not contain a large number resin, birch is well suited for this, but spruce and pine will give a lot of smoke and there is a high probability of ignition of the resin inside the can, then the process of making activated carbon will be ruined.
This stage can be called dry distillation of wood. In this case, all combustible gases (provided that the lid is tightly closed) will go out into the holes made in the bottom of the can and immediately burn in the fire. Thus, there will be practically no smoke and smell, which means that this method can literally be used to make activated carbon at home. But if, instead of holes in the bottom, you use the absence of a lid or distill wood in a saucepan or frying pan, there will be a lot of smoke, so you can only make charcoal outdoors. Using the "no lid" method, it is better to sprinkle the chocks with dry sand so that the distillation runs evenly and the wood does not ignite.
Further, when the release of gases and steam stops, you should remove the jar from the heat and let it cool. We open the lid and see black charcoal there, but it is not activated charcoal yet.
Let's move on to the second stage.
We take out the charcoal from the jar and put it in a saucepan or other jar and completely fill it with water. We put on fire and boil for 20-30 minutes. This is the activation process, boiling water washes the pores of the charcoal, washing out all minerals.
Third final stage.
We spread the still raw, but already activated carbon back into a jar with holes in the bottom and put on fire. We dry the coals in this way, now, instead of combustible gas, pure water vapor comes out of the pores. After all the moisture has evaporated and the coals have cooled down, the whole action can be considered complete. Activated carbon is ready! By weight, such coals feel almost weightless, because all the pores are free.

You need to store activated carbon in glass jar, closed with a lid or in a plastic hermetically sealed container, thus, the activity of coal will persist for several years. But when oxygen is available, the properties of coal are lost in a few months.

Charcoal consists of pores, cracks going deeper. The pores have different diameters. Larger pores are macropores, medium mesopores and small micropores. Molecules that we want to get rid of are stuck in these gaps. Activated carbon differs from ordinary carbon in that it has longer pores and more molecules can get stuck there. The efficiency of activated carbon is higher.

How are we going to activate charcoal.

At the first stage, we will drive the water into the pores. You can soak the charcoal or boil it in a saucepan or pressure cooker. Under the influence of heat, water molecules move deeper into the pores, hit the walls and slightly expand, deepen them.

At the second stage, we place the swollen coal in an oven that is hot, to the maximum. Water molecules will receive a dramatically greater energy, begin to rush about in the pores, tearing them apart. To make charcoal with long pores, heatstroke is necessary, the oven must be preheated to the maximum.

To activate coal, we buy it in the store. The most important thing is that it is clean and does not smell of smoke, otherwise the moonshine will take on the smell.

Pour coal into a bag of sugar and beat it with a hammer or the butt of an ax, crushing it. Pour the crushed coal into a colander, which is located above the pan. Stirring it by hand, the dust settles into the pan, put the coarse coals back in the bag for grinding. We do all this on the street, as there is a lot of dust. You can do it in another way, soak the coal in water, and then grind it, there will be less dust.

I put the crushed coal into the pressure cooker and pour it over with water. I put it on fire, for an hour and an hour there is coal under pressure, in water vapor. I don’t know how much to boil, maybe more.

At the second stage of activating charcoal, pour it onto a baking sheet and place it in a hot oven. The coal will crackle. I keep it there until it dries, and the smell of charcoal appears. Then I turn off the oven, the coal dries up.

Checking coal for activation. I pour it into the water, the coal starts to hiss, to bubble.

Charcoal activation.

Even the ancient people noticed that if the wood does not come into contact with fire during the burning process, then the resulting coal absorbs all extraneous odors better. Initially, in order to achieve the desired "activity", the coal was placed in a closed clay pot and thus subjected to heat treatment. Such carbon was called activated only when they learned how to produce it on an industrial scale. The name follows from the process of activating the absorbent properties of such coal, when it becomes capable of absorbing foreign molecules and compounds.

Charcoal has been removed from activated carbon for a long time. A more adapted material is used for this product: coconut shells, fruit seeds, charcoal, silicone gels and organic polymers. A very high percentage of microcracks per specific weight of the finished product is achieved by special processing. Thus, in production with the help of special technologies, a content of more than 1000 pores per gram of coal is achieved. For comparison, at home you can get activated carbon with only a few tens of pores per gram of product.

Varieties of activated carbon

In its finished form, activated carbon looks like granules about 1 mm in size. After production, finer dust also remains, which, however, is no less valuable, since it has the same absorbency. Granular charcoal is often briquetted and pressed for simplicity and ease of use. Powdered charcoal is often used for water purification filters.... But the most popular form of activated charcoal is charcoal tablets. The granules are compressed into tablets - they can be similarly crushed into powder for different purposes.

The meaning of the action of this medicine lies in the fact that the initial raw material, processed at a high temperature, turns into porous coal with many micro-slots, which tend to fill their empty space with any materials of a suitable size. The huge sorption (absorbent) capacity of a product such as activated carbon determines its effectiveness.

However, will activated carbon be able to cope with all the toxins and hazardous substances that have entered the body or into the water filter? What activated carbon is made of determines the size of cracks and pores on its surface. If the cracks are less than the substance that the coal particle collided with, it will not be able to absorb it.... For example, some heavy metals, minerals and trace elements.

Composition of activated carbon tablets

The "activation" of activated carbon, thanks to which it got its name, consists in the fact that in the process heat treatment raw materials at high temperatures do not come into contact with fire. Raw materials are insulated directly from the flame or electrical heating methods are used.

The tablets include:

• Activated carbon;
• starch;
• "Black salt".

This form of release is used for some food intoxication.... It should be remembered that the properties of activated carbon are not only in the absorption of toxins, but it also absorbs useful microelements to the same extent. In this case, potassium, magnesium and calcium are first "washed out". Therefore, the presence of black salt in the composition is a very useful additional source of these microelements for the body. Not all tablet forms are produced with the same composition, and the presence of black salt must be specified in the composition information on the package. There is another type of pill, which consists of activated carbon, starch and sugar.

Activated carbon acts on substances by binding their active properties... It binds alkaloids, barbiturates and many other active substances, absorbing them and removing them from the body in a natural way. It does not have a sufficient adsorbing effect on acids and alkalis, as well as on iron salts, cyanides, malathion, methanol, ethylene glycol.

The drug is most effective when taken either before or immediately after poisoning. It can be taken topically for ulcers and other injuries to speed up healing.

The principle of action of activated carbon

In this article, we found out that coal tends to fill many of its voids that have arisen in its structure after being treated with high temperatures. Once in contaminated water or other liquid (for example, among the contents of the stomach or intestines), coal absorbs everything that can linger in its cracks-pores. It should be remembered that if there was not enough coal, then its adsorbing effect may be ineffective if the amount of adsorbed substances exceeds the ability to absorb them.

Food can also interfere with this process and its presence in the stomach should be accompanied by an increase in the dose, which on average is 1 tablet per 10 kg of body weight - with a slight upset. The main effect of coal, leading to its "activity", is the number of pores, which reaches its maximum size with proper processing of raw materials. Thanks to this porosity, coal becomes weightless and one gram of coal is able to accommodate a thousand or more pores and microcracks, which is achieved using ultra-high temperatures.

Activated carbon is a universal drug that has been successfully used for many years in medicine, chemical, pharmaceutical and Food Industry... Filters containing activated carbon are used in many modern models of devices for the purification of drinking water, as they can even clean chlorine.

Activated carbon has been known to mankind since ancient times. This is perhaps one of the very first medicines, and for many centuries doctors and herbalists could not find a worthy or replacement for it. But times have changed. Now in pharmacies you can buy a variety of drugs, the action of which is similar to the action of activated carbon. So how was it made before, and how is it made now?

What was activated carbon made of before?

Mankind has learned to use coal for the treatment of gastrointestinal diseases for a long time. To obtain such coal, some types of wood were burned: birch, fruit trees... After burning, the coals were steamed at a very high temperature. It was easiest for our ancestors to cook it in a bathhouse, where part of the birch coals was taken from the oven and left in the steam room for the activation process itself. It is distinguished from ordinary coal by its incredibly low weight. And due to the porosity and low weight, the absorbent and absorbent properties of coal are tenfold increased. Coal in those days was used not only as a medicine. They were filtering water just like now, they drove through it alcoholic drinks even treated livestock and poultry with this versatile remedy.

What is activated carbon made of today?

But times have changed, and modern technologies have replaced Russian baths. They make it possible to produce a huge amount of activated carbon much faster, but its porosity is invariably higher compared to earlier counterparts. And if earlier the activation of coal was physical, then in modern pharmacology, coal is activated by chemical methods. Although he does not become more dangerous because of this. The process of chemical activation of coal consists in treating the coal mass with a certain composition of salts, as a result of which it is possible to avoid keeping the coal under the pressure of hot steam. Although some companies still practice the physical process of charcoal activation. This process is today called steam-gas activation of coal. It is more environmentally friendly, and such a preparation costs more than chemically activated carbon. The resulting drug can be in the form of tablets, small granules or a simple paste, it all depends on its further use: in the form of filters for liquids, medicines, or in industrial production.