Comparing properties of activated carbon prepared by microwave heating method with those prepared by conventional heating method

To our knowledge, there is no paper in the open literature dealing with comparing properties of activated carbon prepared by microwave heating and conventional heating. Section 1 of the full paper briefs our experimental setup, whose schematic, presented in Fig.1, includes 11 explanatory notes, and experimental method. We point out that explanatory note No.5 is particularly important for making our experiments succeed. Section 2 presents experimental results and their discussion. Figs.2 and 3 present the results respectively for MW (micro wave) and EF (electric furnace); the five curves in both figures being respectively at fixed KOH/MCMB (mesocarbon microbead) mass ratios of 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9; their comparison is given in Table 1, which shows that both surface areas and three different pore volumes for MW are respectively higher than those for EF. Tables 2 and 3 and Fig.4 are for KOH/MCMB mass ratios fixed at 5, 7 and 8. the results in Tables 2 and 3 show preliminarily that the activation time for MW is much shorter than that for EF. The results of FTIR (Fourier transform infrared) spectroscopy analysis presented in Fig.4 show preliminarily that the activated carbon for MW exhibits lower concentration oxygen-containing groups than those of the activated carbon for EF.