Takeaway: Activated carbon filters capture odor-causing vapors and take them out of circulation. Considering using these filters in your growroom? Here's what you need to know.
Activated carbon filters are widely used to reduce odors and control emissions from greenhouses and other growing operations. The ambient air is circulated through the activated carbon filter and returned to the greenhouse or discharged outside.
Understanding the basic guidelines of how activated carbon filters work will help growers use the technology with greater reliability and lower overall cost.
For starters, activated carbon is basically a sponge that captures odor-causing vapors and takes them out of circulation. The level of odor-causing chemicals is lowered and thus the odor, which is the nose’s detection and quantification of the presence of non-air molecules, is reduced.
At some level, called the odor threshold, a typical nose cannot detect the presence of the odor compound in the air and the odor is considered absent, although the chemical is likely still there at a reduced level. This can be a problem, since the slightest increase in the level of the odor compound in the air brings it above the odor threshold and suddenly the odor is detected.
Furthermore, smelling most odors leads to odor fatigue, where the nose’s sensitivity decreases with extended exposure. Someone entering the room can clearly smell the odor, but the person who has been there for a while cannot.
If you want to check for the presence of an odor in a grow space, you must leave and breathe some fresh air for long enough to clear the background sensitivity of your nose to the odor you are checking for.
Activated carbon works by a phenomenon called adsorption, where the odor compound is trapped inside the activated carbon and retained, but the material doing the adsorption does not change size. Adsorption differs from absorption, which also removes things, but the result is swelling.
Both adsorption and absorption media have fixed capacities, meaning they hold just so much, since they are storing the material removed from the air, not destroying it.
It is easier to tell what is going on with absorption, since the size increase equals the amount of material removed; with absorption, there is a weight gain, but it is hard to measure and we need to use other means to gauge the remaining life of a carbon filter.
Activated carbon removes odors by offering the odor-causing compound a more attractive place to reside than circulating in the air. The adsorbed state—when the odor compound leaves the air and gets retained inside the activated carbon—is called a lower-energy state and it is as if the molecule falls into a hole and cannot get out.
New activated carbon has lots of unoccupied holes and virtually every compound that passes through falls in a hole and is retained.
Over time, the empty holes fill up. The molecules that are adsorbed with higher energy, sort of like weighing more, can displace the lower-energy molecules that are less tightly held, leading to molecular musical chairs.
This phenomenon, called displacement, can basically drive one crazy, since odors seem to come out of nowhere when a lightly adsorbed odor compound is knocked off the carbon filter by a heavier compound, whether that compound smells or not. There is no way to program activated carbon to take out one compound and leave the rest alone.
The technical term for the first time an adsorbable compound is sensed at the exit of a carbon filter is called breakthrough and when the filter is full, this is called saturation. When it comes to odors, and especially because of odor fatigue, these benchmarks are in the eye—or nose, I guess—of the beholder.
How Much Can a Carbon Filter Hold?
Activated carbon filters are a bit like oil filters on a car—they remove a certain percentage each time through the filter until they get full, at which point they remove essentially nothing. Depending on the design of the filter, how fast air is passing through it, what is in the air and many other factors, the odor of the exiting air is determined.
The end of the filter’s usable life is the point where the amount of odor removed each time through the filter is too little to justify continued operation, at which point the carbon filter should be replaced.
"Ultimately, the capacity in an activated carbon filter is determined by how much carbon there is and the quality of that carbon."
The amount of odor removed by the filter is the difference between the entering level of odor compound and the level exiting. A lot of removal occurs after breakthrough and after the odor threshold is exceeded. The activated carbon filter continues to remove a portion of the odor compound all the way to saturation.
How Long Do Carbon Filters Last?
Depending on the acceptable level of odor in the greenhouse or exiting air, it may be necessary to take a carbon filter offline well before saturation is reached. Filter manufacturers know this and strive to supply filters that approach the ideal filter performance.
The sharper breakthrough and the more vertical the rise, the easier it is to use the entire capacity of the activated carbon filter. In general, the slower the flow rate through the filter, the closer the filter will operate to the limit of ideal performance.
Thus, if odor is exiting the filter above the acceptable level, the recommended strategy is to slow the flow rate thorough a filter (using a fan speed controller) to cause the exiting concentration of odor compound to decrease to below the acceptable level.
Over the life of the filter, a series of flow reductions will allow the largest total amount of odor to be removed while maintaining an acceptable odor level in the growing space.
Ultimately, the capacity in an activated carbon filter is determined by how much carbon there is and the quality of that carbon. It is relatively easy to make an activated carbon filter that looks good right out of the blocks—all the available holes are empty and they grab the first thing they encounter, but the ultimate value of an activated carbon filter is how long it provides ongoing improvement of the air passing through it.
Activated carbon quality is like octane in gasoline; you can definitely pack more of it into a given amount of weight or space. Activated carbon quality is determined on a weight basis, per pound of material, through a number of tests, such as iodine number, BET surface area and butane activity.
Activated carbons differ in density, or how much weight per unit volume. Thus, one can have a really high capacity (like octane) times a really low density (like popcorn), and one ends up with much less in the tank, so to speak.
When selecting an activated carbon filter to purchase, look for quality measurements, which go by names like CTC number, iodine number, butane activity and BET surface area.
Note that different labels use different measures ­and how much of one equals how little of another is application specific. Truth be told, most of the metrics measure the wrong thing, but it is true that more is better, no matter what is counted.
How Much Carbon Is in the Filter?
The next stop is how much carbon is in the filter: too little of a good thing is, frankly, too little. On the label, carbon may be listed in either weight or volume. If the quality is in units of weight, one must hope that the quantity number is in similar units, or you know nothing.
For example, simply stating that 10 gal. of some number of good stuff per ounce means you are lost if you don’t know the density (ounces per volume). If the calculation has a favorable answer, it will be on the label.
The volume available for activated carbon is how much media the filter will contain, but it is basically the weight of that media that matters. Weight is either how much the filter holds in activated carbon, or the available volume times the density or specific gravity of the carbon.
The specific gravity—the ratio of the weight of a volume of carbon compared to the weight of the same volume of water—is a good indication of quality: the higher the specific gravity, the better.
Good carbons have a specific gravity of 0.45 to 0.55. Specific gravity is easy to measure, just fill a container with the activated carbon, weigh it, then fill the same container with water and weigh that. The ratio of the two weights is the specific gravity.
What Does It All Mean for Growers?
At the end of the day, for a given amount of activated carbon of a given quality, there are few tricks that will make any difference. The flow rate through the filter should be adjusted to provide an acceptable level of odor exiting the filter, and being comfortably below that flow rate is better.
Having more filters is better since they help each other keep the odor level below the acceptable level. Activated carbon does not go bad over time and there is no clever way to use it up faster that leads to increased capacity.
Read More: Your Grow Room Stinks. Now What?
When one is buying an activated carbon filter, one is basically buying a certain amount of odor removal capacity and that capacity is directly related to the quality and quantity of activated carbon in the filter, not all the bells and whistles.