Activated carbon has important uses ranging from agricultural, environmental, mining as well as manufacturing industries. Being carbonacous with a highly complex, uneven structure, it has an enormous surface area of miscroscopic pores which boast excellent adsorption capabilities. These adsorption capabilites are used as a separation method for purification and filtration of various industrial streams.

The quality of activated carbon ranges depending on its raw material sources and level of activation which directly affects its pore within its lattice structure. With quality of activated carbon being an important differentiator to its adsorption performance, high quality activated carbon is often a very expensive and necessary raw material to many industrial operations. This has clearly developed a great market demand to encourage the recycling and reuse of activated carbon within industry. The ability to remove contaminants within the pores of used activated carbon thus regenerating activated carbon would provide a clearly needed second life for this important raw material.

The VacuDry® vacuum distillation is especially suitable for this purpose. Operating under heated vacuum conditions, absent of air, VacuDry® is able to carefully and safely remove contaminants from activated carbon. This not only provides significantly reduced amounts of waste requiring disposal but also regenerates the activated carbon for re-use.

Removal of mercury, volatile organic carbons (VOCs) and any other organic substances is achievable via the VacuDry® process. Being a closed loop vacuum distillation process, the opportunity also exists to recover the contaminant for re-use.

With flexibility in engineering and modular design, VacuDry® can be optimised for the targeted separation of the contaminant of interest to be an automated, dependable solution to regenerating activated carbon and recovery contaminants. Being among the most efficient thermal systems, VacuDry® is a compelling economic way to avoid expensive landfill costs and allow reuse of activated carbon.