Chapter 18 - An overview on processing aspects and environmental applications of activated carbon fibers

Abstract

Environmental pollution due to textile industrial wastes has become one of the serious issues all over the world. The textile wastewater contains various chemical pollutants such as dyes, pigments, heavy metal salts, sizing agents, complexing agents, softening agents, and stiffening agents. The textile wastewater has a very dangerous impact on the surrounding environment which affects seriously the human life. One innovative way for recycling is to use the textile waste itself to get rid of it safely or to convert it into smart adsorbing material such as activated carbons. ACF, which has huge surface area and large pore size distributions, is widely used as advanced adsorbent materials and smart filters to adsorb and illuminate many textile industrial wastes. ACFs can be produced from fiber wastes such as acrylic fibers, cotton, and/or viscous. The preparation of ACF from polyacrylonitrile fibers was carefully studied through carbonization and activation steps. The activation step, which could be chemical or physical activation, is effectively engineered to control the surface area and porous structure properties of ACF. It was proven that chemical and physical structure properties of ACF greatly affect and design the adsorption ability of ACF. The removal of textile wastes, mainly dye wastes and heavy metal salts, was the main issue of using ACF as a smart adsorbing material in this chapter. ACF showed a great adsorbability to remove textile liquid wastes with a great efficiency which can reach up to 99% dye removal and 95% heavy metal removal. This is attributed to the surface functional groups and the great porous structure of ACF.