Investigation of the effect of acid treatment on textile waste carbonization and its properties

• Main Author: Ching, Sherryl Zi Wei
• Other Authors: Lai Changquan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering; Chemical activation; Carbonisation
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/176071
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The fabrication of activated carbon from textile waste is an upcycling method to transform textile wastes into high value-added activated carbon that opened new opportunities for its applications in water treatment and energy storage applications due to its high specific surface area. Phosphoric acid is usually used as the activator to promote the pores formation and enhance the specific surface area of the precursor. While the effect of the acids on activating textile waste had been extensively studies for homogenous material such as 100 % cotton fabric, there remains a gap in understanding its effect on blended materials. Hence, in this project, activated carbon was synthesised using a blended textiles of 70 % cotton-30 % polyester as the precursor. The textiles were chemically activated with vary acid concentration and analysed using characterisation techniques such as SEM, TGA, FTIR and BET to compare the morphology and specific surface area of the samples. The BET surface area increased by 95 % with the addition of 10 % acid concentration (AC-10) and reached the maximum of 1472 m2/g with 50 % acid concentration (AC-50). An improvement in carbon yield of 71 % was observed with AC-50 generating the highest carbon yield of 29.84 % and non-activated carbon (AC-0) having the lowest carbon yield of 17.35 %. However, a decline in the performance of water purification was observed with increasing acid concentration.AC-10 had the shortest time of 6 minutes while AC-50 took 26 minutes.