Case studies · CBRN personal protection · protective clothing
Activated carbon spheres for permeable NBC suit fabric
Impermeable NBC suits protect well and are close to unwearable in heat. Permeable protective fabric solves that, but only if the adsorbent can live inside the textile. Suracsh developed an activated carbon sphere media for it over more than 200 trials.
Partner: Indian defence sector
The problem
NBC suits protect the wearer against direct contact with and contamination by radioactive, biological and chemical substances, and are meant to be worn long enough for the wearer to keep working under threat.
Impermeable suits are extremely uncomfortable over a long period. In hot climates the wearable period becomes very short, which turns a protection problem into an operational one.
A permeable chemical protective fabric is the alternative: an open porous structure that passes air and lets perspiration escape. That only works if the adsorbent itself is a form that can sit inside a fabric without closing it up.
What we did
The answer is the activated carbon sphere — a hard, dimensionally accurate, low-ash spherical adsorbent made from polymeric precursors, which packs into a textile without blocking air passage and cuts garment weight against conventional media.
Developing a commercially stable version took more than 200 lab-scale and pilot trials, across more than 25 types of raw material, with the process optimized at each stage.
Outcome
The programme produced a stable commercial activated carbon sphere media for high-performance NBC filter fabric, supplied into the Indian defence sector.
The same sphere technology is published as the SURSORB Ultra and SURSORB Neo grades.