Design of Low Cost, Highly Adsorbent Activated Carbon Fibers for Air/ Water Purification

摘要

U.S. troops face increasing risk of exposure to chemical and biological warfare threats as poorer nations and terrorist groups turn to these lower cost weapons for their arsenals. Despite the increased menace from these lethal agents, gas mask technology has remained virtually unchanged over the past several decades thus leaving soldiers at risk to newly developed nerve and pathogenic agents designed to defeat conventional GAC gas mask technology. EKOS Materials Corp. proposes a novel activated carbon fiber (ACF) that will combine the low cost and durability of GAC with tailored pore size and pore surface chemistry for improved defense against chemical weapons. One of the key advantages of this ACF is that it can be manufactured in a wide variety of product forms (textiles, felts, papers) which allows for vast design flexibility. Thus the potential exists to utilize carbon coated sub-micron glass fibers to replace both components of the current gas mask (HEPA filter and GAC) to greatly reduce pressure drop and achieve filtration/adsorption in a single step.