You would only need to heat the material to a high temperature under inert atmosphere. The absence of oxygen will allow the material to be converted into carbon and combustion will not occur i.e. no ash. This is usually done under flowing nitrogen or argon typical around temperatures of 800 C to remove most of the heteroatoms. What are you using the material for? Because these conditions can be catered if you had a specific application in mind for the material.
How pure do you require? That will strongly affect the methods that are most economical.
Thanx alot for your kind consideration, i want to prepare activated and surface functionalize carbon from palm leaflets, because of the formation of ash, the carbon amount will be less. as much pure as possible i need pure carbon.
Another thing if we creat inert atmosphere but still oxygen is there in leaflets and converted into metal oxide(ash).
Prepare activated carbon in Nitrogen atmosphere. You will get ashless carbon.
Thanx alot Lakshmipathy Raj. can you little explain the method in detail, what else conditions i must keep in mind to make ashless carbon, in lab all things must be available to do it practically.
You need to have a furnace with nitrogen/argon flow to fulfill your need. During the time of increase in temperature (say from room temperature to 750C) volatile gases evolved from your material will elute out by the flow of inert gases. hence availability of oxygen from volatile gases can thus be minimized.
All the best for preparing pure activated carbon.
But remember these pyrolysis techniques will not give you 'pure' carbon they will give you activated charcoal. All the non-volatile or imcombustible minerals (e.g. phosphorous, calcium) and metals (e.g. iron Mg Mn) will still be in the 'carbon'.
Thanx alot for all, but my friend did the same, prepared activated carbon in Nitrogen at high temp. but got 14% ash(metal oxide) as paul said. so how to remove these metal oxides is main issue
I am not sure if there are standardized procedures but I would suggest extensive leaching/washing with water then an organic acid then an organic base. But this would be a time consuming process and I am not sure ultimately how effective if it would be. If your aim is to get PURE CARBON then the source would seem to be irrelevant and you could just buy it commercially !
This can be done by the production of activated carbon which involves 2 steps - carbonisation and activation steps. Carbonisation is an inert thermal process to convert raw materials into solid char, while activation increases the surface area of the activated carbon. Activation can be done physically or chemically. Physical activation involves carbonisation of the material followed by activation of the resulting char in the presence of activatiing agents such as carbon dioxide or steam. Chemical activation involves impregnating the material with chemical activating agents such as Zn Cl2, H3PO4, KOH and K2CO3 followed by heat treatment in inert atmoshphere at various temperatures. See Teng et al 2000, Sudaryanto et al 2006, Yangmur et al 2008, Belgacem et al 2014. Hope this helps
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