How to make activated carbon. Diy activated carbon

Activated carbon has a solid history and a wide range of applications.

Many people are interested in two questions: what Activated carbon what is it for? This tool is a drug that helps cleanse the body. Activated carbon has been known to man for more than three thousand years. More residents Ancient Rome used this product to purify water and wine. Hippocrates, however, recommended using it to cleanse the human body. A large number of recipes of that time for the preparation of activated carbon for treatment have survived to this day. different kinds diseases and poisoning. In the history of medicine, there are cases when this drug relieved people from the most severe poisoning. It turns out that even a few millennia ago, people knew what is activated carbon for?.

Activated carbon properties

The properties of activated carbon are simply amazing in their versatility.... Firstly, this remedy relieves the human body from intoxication caused not only by food, but also by poisons. Secondly, it is used for heaviness in the stomach and for digestive problems. Thirdly, this drug helps the body to cleanse itself of toxins and other harmful substances that enter the body with food. Fourth, activated carbon is excellent. Fifth, this drug helps to get rid of allergies, dermatitis, psoriasis and edema. Sixth, activated charcoal is used to treat various joint diseases, in particular from gout. Seventh, activated charcoal is a good adsorbent to get rid of a hangover. Eighth, the drug is able to cure otitis media of the middle and outer ear. Ninth, this remedy is used in the treatment of epilepsy. And finally tenth property of activated carbon- getting rid of impotence.

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Activated carbon. Composition

The activated carbon composition has the following fine-pored amorphous carbon activated by special treatment. This component has adsorbent and catholic properties. The porosity of coal by volume ranges from 15 to 97.5%. Thus, the composition of activated carbon is quite simple.

Activated carbon. What are they made of?

As noted earlier, For many years, activated carbon has been very popular. What is this drug made of? In its production, charcoal and coal, as well as peat are used. The components are heated in special vacuum containers and then undergo special processing. Now you know, what is activated carbon made of.

Activated carbon. How to apply?

Well-known activated carbon, not everyone knows how to apply correctly.... Domestic doctors recommend apply activated carbon inside a few hours before meals. The average daily dosage can range from 100 to 200 milligrams per kilogram. The daily dose is divided into three doses. The duration of treatment should be 3 to 14 days. After two weeks, the course of treatment can be repeated again.

Even 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 to produce it in 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. By special processing a very high percent microcracks on specific gravity finished product. Thus, in production using special technologies achieve a content of more than 1000 pores per gram of coal. For comparison, at home you can get activated carbon with only a few tens of pores per gram of product.

Varieties of activated carbon

V 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 also be ground into powder for different purposes in the same way.

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 that tend to fill their empty space with any materials. suitable size... The huge sorption (absorbent) capacity of a product such as activated carbon determines its effectiveness.

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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

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

The composition of the tablets includes:

Activated carbon;
starch;
"Black salt".

This form of release is used for some food intoxications.... 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. "Washed out" in this case, first of all potassium, magnesium and calcium. Therefore, the presence of black salt in the composition is a very useful additional source of these microelements for the body. Not all forms of tablets are produced with the same composition, and the presence of black salt must be specified in the information on the composition 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 and excreting them from the body in a natural way of cleansing. 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 processing. 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. Due 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 versatile product that has been successfully used for many years in medicine, chemical, pharmaceutical and food industries. Filters containing activated carbon are used in many modern models cleaning devices drinking water, as they are able to clean even from chlorine.

You can make activated carbon at home using carbon-containing organic components. To get a sorbent, you need to carefully follow the steps technological process... This material is allowed to be used in cleaning filters. It is enough to replace the product contained in the cartridges with a handmade one.

Raw materials for the manufacture of activated carbon

In pharmacological production, they create from burnt animal bones, petroleum and coal coke. If you want to get the drug yourself at home, take wood that does not contain a large amount of resinous substances, coconut shells, hazelnuts and walnuts.

It is easy to make charcoal with your own hands from birch, which grows in almost every corner of the country.

Charcoal Activated Carbon

People often purchase the product while going out into the countryside, preparing kebabs and barbecues. This material almost does not differ in qualities from the pharmacological, has absorbing properties and cleans the liquid from dirt. But use better material made by a reliable manufacturer from rocks with a low resin content. If you are not sure of the quality, it is preferable to do it yourself at home.

It is not difficult to activate such a “drug”. You can increase the absorbency and binding capacity by leaving the activated charcoal water for several hours in a well-sunlit area. In this case, the sorbent will eliminate mechanical debris and chemical compounds, bacteria that are present in the raw liquid.

Coconut shell

To make activated carbon, fruit purification is used. Remove the pulp and milk, and then burn its hard shell in a special way.

How to make activated carbon?

There are methods that are easy to reproduce at home, especially for residents countryside... There is no need for financial costs, the technology of each process is easy, there is no need to search for any chemical components in advance.

Methods

To prepare the activated carbon yourself, the instructions are strictly followed. I would like to note that such a product should not be used as a medicine. For internal use, it is better to buy pharmacy black tablets that have passed necessary steps cleaning. Price medicinal product low.

The material has been shown to be produced and used at home to improve the performance of water filters.

Physical method

The recipe for this method provides for the presence of a coconut shell:

Raw materials are slowly burned at a low temperature.
When the hard shell turns black, it is transferred to a liquid medium.
The solution is prepared from 1 part water and 1/4 table salt. This method activates the charcoal at home, forcing the pores to open.
After a day, the material is washed several times to remove the remains of sodium chloride.
Dry the charcoal in the oven or in the sunlight.

Instead of coconut, sometimes walnut or hazelnut shells are used. In this case, preparation will take less time and will be cheaper. The shell of an exotic fruit is dense, more difficult to burn at home.

Trees of various species

Activated carbon can be made using the following scheme:

Broken birch branches are placed on the bottom of a frying pan that is no longer needed in the household.
Fall asleep with sand.
The mixture is heated for 1.5–2 hours until black coals are obtained.
The finished material is transferred to a sieve or colander, and then kept in a water bath.
The cooled pieces are pounded and transferred to a glass container.

If this method seems tricky, it's easy to resort to the simplified one:

Pieces of wood are placed in tin can, which is calcined over an open fire until complete removal resin.
The cooled charcoal is tied in cheesecloth and kept over boiling water for several minutes.

In addition to birch branches, an activated preparation can be made from linden, alder, aspen, beech, pine, poplar, spruce. The tree must not be more than 50 years old.

Algorithm of actions

To obtain quality material, it is necessary to observe several nuances of the production cycle.

Dry distillation of raw materials

At home, the operation is performed using:

open fire;
blowtorch;
bake;
gas stove.

Take dry wood, which is pre-crushed.

The following conditions facilitate the procedure:

The raw materials are put into a small tin container. In it, you need to make several holes in the lower part so that the smoke comes out. In this case, the gas generated in the process is burned with a flame, which reduces the risks.
The container itself is tightly closed. If this is not possible, it is advisable to make a sand cushion over the treated wood. In addition, branches need to be burned in the absence of access. fresh air... In this case, uniform carbonization is ensured.

Stop the process when the pieces are completely burned out.

Coal activation

Typically, at home, they resort to a steam bath to open the pores, or to placing the product in boiling water. But the second method has several disadvantages:

The duration of the procedure is 20-25 minutes.
The carbon black is washed out, which provokes a decrease in the absorbent surface.

In order for the activated product to turn out to be of high quality, it is necessary to remove the remaining moisture.

Drying

The stage depends on the conditions in which the process is performed. Homes for final preparation are used:

Fresh air;
sunlight;
oven.

So that activated carbon does not lose for a long time useful qualities, you must follow a number of simple rules.

Storage

If you make a cleansing product yourself, you need to keep it, adhering to the following conditions:

Pre-crushed.
Pour into a glass container with a tight lid.
Placed in a cool and unlit place, for example, refrigerator, cellar.

In this case, the activated product retains its quality for several years. With absence optimal conditions the term of use is limited to months, and sometimes weeks.

Cases when it is necessary to clean the moonshine happen quite often. As a rule, sugar, starch and some grain distillates are purified. Often the question this question arises when it was necessary, and the distillate is not quite worthy of quality. Distillers also practice the purification of raw alcohol before distilling it again. And even if you happen to (we recommend choosing an apparatus with a distillation column of the brand or with a dry steam generator of the brand) of high quality, cleaning may be required to save the situation when gross violations distillation technology.

The practice of cleaning moonshine with activated charcoal is widely known. Natural charcoal is an excellent sorbent: it captures and retains a variety of molecules in solution. You can prepare charcoal for cleaning moonshine right in your kitchen. More precisely, charcoal can be activated. To understand what activation is for, consider the essence of the process of purifying moonshine using coal.

What is charcoal activation for?

Fragments of coal have pores and cracks. They, in turn, have a tree-like structure: wide pores - "tunnels" branch out into narrower ones, and those into even narrower ones, and so on. How smaller diameter pores, the smaller the molecules get stuck in it, held by the charges of carbon molecules emerging into the pore lumen.

Molecules of "fusel oils" - the main enemy of a good drink - are, in their mass, large molecules of alcohols. They are well adsorbed by carbon, while small molecules ethyl alcohol freely leave his pores.

Of course, it would be better to know that it allows you to cut off impurities as much as possible, and additional purification is simply not required. But when working with any device, there is human factor, so always be careful when distilling. And if you are thinking about purchasing a reliable distiller, then visit the sites of official manufacturers, you can with a guarantee and just one click.

Activated charcoal differs from usual topics that has many more branched pores, it is literally penetrated by them. The more pores, the more absorbing capacity, the more impurities the coal is able to absorb. Below we will talk about how to make activated charcoal for purifying moonshine from simple charcoal.

The choice of coal and the procedure for its activation

Charcoal is taken for charcoal grills. However, it is important that it does not smell like smoke, otherwise it will inevitably be passed on to the drink. The optimal choice- natural birch charcoal for barbecues.
The process of activating (manufacturing) coal for purifying moonshine is reduced to the expansion and even greater cracking of the pores in its particles. This is done using physical properties plain water. Due to the heating of the water soaking the coal, its molecules begin to “pound” with great force into the walls of the pores, contributing to their ever greater cracking.

Thus, to make coal for cleaning moonshine, you will need:

Put charcoal for the barbecue in a bag of sugar and grind it with a hard blunt object. A hammer works well for these purposes if applied flat. It is best to do this outdoors as dust will still fly.
Place a colander or sieve on a bowl (saucepan) and pour chopped charcoal into it. Dust and very small particles will pass through the filter, you will need the ones that remain on the sieve.
Put the charcoal in a saucepan, add water and boil for 60 minutes.
By the way. Coal can be crushed after boiling, then there will be less dust. However, the coal "dust" itself can also be used to clean moonshine.
After boiling, drain the water from the coal, put the coal on a baking sheet and send it to the oven for 60-90 minutes, preheated to the maximum temperature. The charcoal will crackle. Heating can be stopped when the characteristic charcoal odor appears.

It is very easy to check the resulting charcoal: put a few pieces in water. Hissing and bubbling indicates that the coal is ready to fight harmful impurities on the guard of cleaning the moonshine. Activated carbon is one of the safest substances for cleaning not only distillates, but also liquids and air. You can find out more about it in our articles.

> 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 harmful effect 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 (jars, 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 step:
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, 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 make charcoal only on 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 coal there, but it is not yet activated carbon.
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 everything 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 a glass jar, closed 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.