Carbon absorbsion
Carbon is one of the most effective water treatment media. In fact, some filters use nothing but carbon to filter water. That’s not an effective solution, but it does show the overall role carbon plays in water filtration. Carbon is a highly porous organic substance. In fact, one pound of activated carbon contains trillions of different sized pores with a surface area of roughly 125 acres.
It’s important to understand that there are different kinds of carbon used in filters. The only one that really delivers safe water is catalytic activated carbon. The problem is that it is also the most expensive form of carbon, and for that reason, is often not used in carbon filters.
Carbon is able to remove/reduce thousands of different volatile organic chemicals (VOCs), pesticides and herbicides, as well as chlorine, benzene, trihalomethane (THM) compounds, radon, solvents and hundreds of other man-made chemicals found in tap water. Standard activated carbon works to remove contaminants from water in two ways. The first is by a process known as adsorption (not absorption) where the electrochemical nature of the compound is able to attract other substances to it.
But catalytic activated carbon also works by catalytic reduction, a process involving the attraction of negatively-charged contaminants to the positively-charged activated carbon matrix. Once there, catalytic sites in the carbon matrix work to break apart certain contaminants into smaller components that can then be adsorbed by the carbon.Catalytic carbon is a recent development in carbon technology. Catalytic carbon works not only by adsorption as with other premium carbons, but it has been developed so that is contains a much larger volume of catalytic sites spread throughout the surface of the media. The difference is significant. For regular carbon to effectively remove chloramine from an average flow of water to a home (5 gallons per minute) it would take 24 cubic feet of regular activated carbon, or 3 cubic feet of catalytic carbon. Developing this functionality in activated carbon is expensive, but catalytic activated carbon is the most effective treatment for compounds like chloramine and pharmaceutical residues that are otherwise very difficult to remove from water.
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