Chemical reactor designed with tin cans and chimney pipes

Argentine scientists have managed to create, using two tin cans and pipes for common chimneys, a chemical reactor that converts wood into coal with which to continue research on water decontamination and energy storage and thus reduce costs.

Reduce expenses as much as possible. This is the premise followed by researchers Pablo Arnal and Leonel Long, Conicet researcher and scholarship holder, respectively, at the Center for Technology of Mineral Resources and Ceramics (Cetmic, Conicet-UNLP-Cicpba) in Argentina, to create an economical and environmentally friendly reactor.

Specifically, it is a furnace that converts wood into charcoal in record time, fulfilling the same function as the expensive equipment required by the conventional methods used to carry out this chemical process.

The device achieved by the scientists, using two tin cans, a medium-sized sheet metal and common chimney pipes, produces 200 grams of charcoal with each setting. Dedicated to the study of new methods of water decontamination, both researchers always came up against the same problem: the high costs of obtaining charcoal, a very valuable material for those researching in this field due to its open structure of large pores at different levels, highly efficient in capturing and retaining different toxic substances from the liquid medium.

“The system we are talking about is used to convert biomass, i.e. the energy that can be obtained from organic matter, such as the trunk of a tree, its leaves and remains of pruning or agricultural activities and even the bones of living beings, into charcoal,” explains Arnal. Its authors describe this advance as “very important” because it will help to expand new and numerous lines of research in the country that today are hindered almost exclusively due to obstacles in the access to the raw material.

Normally, this conversion is carried out in a laboratory by means of a chemical reactor consisting of a quartz glass tubular furnace that on one side receives an inert gas, which can be argon, helium or nitrogen, located inside a drum that is heated and in which the material to be carbonized is inserted.

“Argon and helium are very expensive and the process is very complex. In addition, at the end you get just 1 gram of charcoal, which forces us to repeat the procedure several times if we want to make a statistically sound study,” adds Long. The development of the homemade system has been published by the prestigious scientific journal Chemistry-Methods, according to the scientific research entity.