8 votes

Making activated carbon

3 comments

  1. knocklessmonster
    Link
    His failed video is also pretty cool, if for no other reason than they made their own charcoal, and used it to cook a stainless steel pot.

    His failed video is also pretty cool, if for no other reason than they made their own charcoal, and used it to cook a stainless steel pot.

    2 votes
  2. asoftbird
    Link
    Interesting, l was just thinking about this this morning. I like fabrication a lot, in the sense of "make your own everything" but mostly for fun / learning how stuff works, not because l'm...

    Interesting, l was just thinking about this this morning.

    I like fabrication a lot, in the sense of "make your own everything" but mostly for fun / learning how stuff works, not because l'm prepping for the apocalypse though l'm sure it'll come in handy.

    These channels are interesting to watch and show just how much knowledge and engineering can go into "mundane" things, or how certain materials have properties that most people don't know about.

    2 votes
  3. davidb
    Link
    We use activated carbon as a filter media for our laser cutter. The exhaust from the machine is pulled through about 50lbs of activated carbon. We used to buy it pellitized but found a cheaper...

    We use activated carbon as a filter media for our laser cutter. The exhaust from the machine is pulled through about 50lbs of activated carbon. We used to buy it pellitized but found a cheaper source that is just ground. The carbon grabs all the nasty smelling gas that is released from the vaporized acrylic.

    The commercial filtering machines in our price range are made for a variety of industrial applications, so the filter media usually includes potassium permanganate as well the charcoal (up to a 50/50 mixture), which isn't very cost efficient for us since all we need is the activated charcoal.

    We briefly looked into making it ourselves, but there's a bunch of manufacturers of filter media and we were able to find it from a number of them for a good price. Still, we have to change the filter media every 1-2 months if we are using the laser for long periods of time. I've been curious how saturated the carbon actually is once the VOC sensor reaches our limit and we change the media. So, the most interesting part of the video for me was the titration experiment at the end where he measured how much iodine his carbon absorbs. Prior to that, my only idea was to measure the density of the carbon before and after.

    2 votes