Importance of Porosity Control in Active Carbon Blocks for Process Water Treatment

Abstract

Water is probably one of the most common ingredient in prepared foods and beverages: biscuits, pastas, cakes, soups, juices, all soft drinks and most of alcoholic ones, just to cite the commonest. The constancy in quality and organoleptic characteristics is a very important factor for the market success of industrial food products. Water is not only H2O, but also a very complex mix of micro ingredients, mainly natural salts, but also disinfectants (as chlorine) or polluting agents, sometimes dangerous for human health. Water changes from country to country, it is different from mountain to the plain, from the north to the south. Anyway, just only chlorine and variable salt content affect the water quality and its organoleptic characteristic.Therefore, in a standardised industrial production the quality control must include also water. Reverse Osmosys (RO) membranes (born in the 50ies during Korean war to help American soldiers to purify the terrific jungle water) has been the first industrial approach in this sense; but, just because RO systems removes around 95% of total dissolved salts, the taste of water is somewhat poor. In the last decade new micro- and ultra-filtration technics have been developed, also for removing heavy metals from drinking water (Chang Q. et al. and Derylo-Marczewska et al.); one important component of such filters is the carbon-block (CB), extruded or synterised active carbon mixed with a plastic polymer under the action of a catalyser (Hines D. et al.); the shape is a hollow cylinder and the permeation of water is from outside to inside, through the cylinder walls. The porosity and the control of pore structure of the walls (or degree of filtration) condition the performance of the filter (Kyotani T.). The aim of this research is to identify a suitable and reliable analytical method in order to compare Think Water’s carbonblocks to other present on the market, and to manage production process parameters.