MOSCOW, May 24. /TASS/. Scientists from the School of Energy and Power Engineering at Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) have developed an energy-efficient technology for producing technical activated coal from industrial waste, the university's press service said on Wednesday. The work was supported by the Russian Ministry of Education and Science's Priority 2030 program.

The new technology is based on two-stage thermal conversion. In the first stage the feedstock is continuously fed into the pyrolysis reaction chamber and heated up to 700 degrees Celsius. As a result, liquid hydrocarbons, combustible gases and carbon residue called semi-coke are formed. The latter is continuously reloaded into another smaller reactor with a working temperature of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. Using carbon dioxide or superheated steam, which are strong activating agents, activated carbon is formed there. The scientists are now preparing an application to patent the technology.

"The peculiarity of our technology is the staged production of three useful products at once, the main of which is activated carbon. It is technical and can be used as a sorbent for wastewater treatment systems or as a raw material for making various materials, such as carbides. Today, production of technical activated carbon is quite expensive because of high energy and cost of raw materials used. This product is mostly imported to Russia from abroad. We have managed to reduce the cost of the final product and minimize energy costs for its production due to the fact that we make all the components for its production ourselves from waste," the press service quotes Konstantin Slyusarski, associate professor of the Butakov Research Center of the School of Energy & Power Engineering.

The scientist noted that in addressing the problem of industrial waste recycling TPU conducts a cycle of applied research to determine the technological way of processing different types of waste and obtaining useful products with high added value from them. "In this case, we worked with industrial waste in bulk form - rubber crumbs, sawdust, nutshells, and granulated plastic," he said.

Scientists assembled an installation for staged thermal conversion based on the developed solution. It is fully automated and allows for physical modeling of the industrial process of thermal processing of waste. It will be used for laboratory research to determine the technological dependencies and to develop the configuration of the industrial unit.