SCREENING IMPREGNATED CARBON RESPIRATOR MATERIALS via THE COMBINATORIAL MATERIALS SCIENCE APPROACH

Introduction Activated carbon has long been used as a gas adsorbent for respirator applications. Untreated activated carbon poorly adsorbs low molecular weight, highly polar gases such as HCN, SO2 and NH3. The addition of impregnants such us metal oxides, metal chlorides and metal carbonates have been known to react with specific challenge gases within the activated carbon pores facilitating the removal of the toxic gases [1-5]. The addition of a combination of several different impregnants allows a single IAC to adsorb many different toxins well [6-8]. Our goal is to find an optimum set of impregnants to apply to an activated carbon so that a specific set of toxins can be effectively adsorbed. However, finding the right combination of impregnants to prepare optimum IAC’s can be time consuming. A strategy for preparing and screening numerous materials simultaneously has been introduced by Joseph Hanak in the 70’s [9]. The technique has been adapted to the sputter-deposition of composition-spread thin films for battery, fuel cell and biomaterials applications [10-12]. A combinatorial materials science approach (combi method) for the discovery of an impregnated activated carbon that can adsorb a wide variety of toxic gases (i.e. a multi-gas carbon) has been developed. This approach presently allows the parallel preparation and investigation of 64 to 100 IAC samples at once increasing the rate of discovery of viable multi-gas carbons.