The Q&A session for this topic is Q&A 2: Emerging Contaminants and Radionuclide Occurrence, Treatment, and Media Disposal.
Activated carbon technology has been around for thousands of years and was originally used to decolorize and filter water. From these beginnings activated carbon has now become widespread throughout many filtration devices addressing the various contaminants we encounter every day. Since then activated carbon has been subject to much research resulting in numerous new technology developments. This discussion covers the basic filtration mechanisms afforded to us by the years of research and is broken down into several categories; chemisorption, physisorption and catalysis. Understanding activated filtration mechanisms can help accelerate further developments and help push the technology to new frontiers.