Novel activated carbon fibre matting from biomass fibre waste

Abstract

Waste biomass flax fibre was manufactured into a non-woven matting material. The fibrous matting was pyrolysed and chemically activated using potassium hydroxide to produce an activated carbon matting. Changes in the activation process conditions showed that increases in chemical loading, activation time and activation temperature generally resulted in greater pore volumes and higher surface areas but a reduction in carbon yield. The preparation temperature of the char precursors showed that lower temperature chars produced carbons with higher porosity but lower yield than chars produced at higher temperatures. The end product activated carbon matting had surface areas of up to 1800 m2/g with a mainly microporous size distribution (pores of <2 nm diameter), but the process conditions could be manipulated to produce a highly microporous or a mixture of microporous and mesoporous (2–50 nm pore diameters) activated carbon. The activated carbon matting characteristics can therefore be altered to produce adsorption properties tailored to a particular pollutant. The non-woven production process may be altered to produce a non-woven matting material of almost any design, width and thickness; consequently, an activated carbon fibrous matting material, also of any design, width and thickness, can be produced.

Production of activated carbons from waste tyres for low temperature NOx control

“…In other cases the process involves the production of a char produced from the pyrolysis of the raw material, followed by impregnation of the char and subsequent activation at higher temperature (Nowicki et al, 2010;Oh and Park, 2002;Illingworth et al, 2012). In this work, the activated carbons produced from the waste materials were prepared by pyrolysis followed by chemical activation with alkali metals.…”

“…Physical activation involves pyrolysis of the feedstock followed by the activation of the resultant char with steam or CO2 as the activating agent (Wigmans, 1989;Kovacik et al, 1995;Hayashi et al, 2000). In chemical activation, the precursor is impregnated or mixed with chemical agents such as KOH, NaOH, H3PO4 and K2CO3 which promotes the formation of cross-links and the formation of a carbon with a rigid matrix Lozano-Castello et al, 2001;Oh and Park, 2002;Lim et al, 2010;Nowicki et al, 2010;Nahil and Williams, 2012;;Illingworth et al, 2012). In relation to chemical activation, both the activation preparation process parameters and the type of feedstock precursor have been shown to influence the properties and characteristics and consequently the end-use application of the product activated carbon (Lozano-Castello et al, 2002;Fierro et al, 2007;Armandi et al, 2011).…”

Non-woven fabric activated carbon produced from fibrous waste biomass for sulphur dioxide control

“…In addition, samples of activated carbon were prepared by physical activation, involving production of the pyrolysis char followed by activation in carbon dioxide. The pyrolysis of the non-woven flax fabric material was carried out in a bench scale static-bed batch reactor, the details of which have been reported in our earlier work (Illingworth et al, 2012). The reactor was constructed of stainless steel (length 200mm, internal diameter 65mm) which enabled the pyrolysis of up to 60 grams of biomass material.…”

“…A particular type of biomass waste is fibrous biomass which has also been investigated for the production of activated carbons (Dizbay-Onat et al, 2017;Shamsuddin et al, 2016;Hwang et al, 2015;Zhao et al 2015). The fibrous nature of the biomass waste material has been utilised in our previous work to produce a non-woven textile fabric matting which is then processed to produce activated carbon that retains its original fabric matting structure after activation (Illingworth et al, 2012;Williams and Reed, 2003;2004). The process has the potential for the fibrous biomass to be produced via textile technology into a variety of preformed shapes.…”

Waste-derived activated carbons for control of nitrogen oxides

“…A variety of solid waste and biomass waste feedstocks have been used to produce activated carbon (Amalraj and Piu, 2013;Buah and Williams, 2010;El-Kady et al, 2013;Gil et al, 2014;Gundogdu et al, 2013;Gupta et al, 2014;Hajizadeh et al, 2011;Illingworth et al, 2012;Liu et al, 2014;Nahil and Williams, 2010). For example, activated carbons have been produced from municipal solid waste and used in the metal extraction industry (Buah and Williams, 2010); from waste tyres and used for dioxin adsorption from flue gases (Hajizadeh et al, 2011); also from waste tyres for use in the adsorption of phenolic compounds (Gupta et al, 2014); from waste fibreboard for use for copper (II) adsorption (Liu et al, 2014); from tannery wastes for use in the removal of dyes (Amalraj and Piu, 2013); from agricultural wastes from the removal of pesticides from water (El-Kady et al, 2013) and so on.…”