From the very beginning, AAE has broken new ground to revolutionize the production of activated carbon. The highest product quality of the activated carbon produced while fully utilizing the usable energy resources was the focus of our own development from the very beginning. All this with maximum automation, so that the personnel required to operate each system is reduced to a minimum with just two people.

The result is the two activated carbon production plants "AAE-3000" and "AAE-6000" based on the One-Step-Activation & Energy-Recovery-Plus technology, which can no longer be surpassed in terms of energy efficiency, production capacity and range of applications.

In principle, any organic material can serve as a carbon carrier for the production of activated carbon. Whether wood, nutshells, fruit kernels, mixed biomass, coke of any kind or coal of fossil origin - almost any material can be processed into activated carbon in one and the same plant and, depending on the potential of the raw material, delivers the maximum possible activated carbon quality while utilizing the energy it also contains. This offers the plant operator maximum flexibility in the selection of raw materials and enables him to offer a wide range of activated carbon qualities at the best price.

The path from raw material to activated carbon is as simple as you could wish for.

The raw material is fed into an open feed hopper, which is connected to a pre-shredding device via a conveyor. Here, the raw material is crushed to the optimum size in order to achieve the desired product particle size, taking into account the optimum activation conditions. Any dust produced is extracted, collected separately and can be processed as a secondary product, for example into fuel pellets. After pre-shredding, the crushed raw material is conveyed via a conveyor into the feed silo at the heart of the activated carbon production process.

This is a special indirectly electrically heated high-temperature rotary kiln with several separately controllable heating zones. Inside the rotary kiln, the raw material is heated to a high temperature in various temperature zones, excluding air and introducing steam, turning it from organic raw material into high-quality activated carbon in a single pass.

The resulting activated carbon is cooled within the same rotary kiln after activation and from there goes into the product silo, from where it is conveyed to the screening plant for classification, where it is divided into the desired fractions. Without further conveying, the activated carbon falls into the automated packaging, from which the dispatchable product only needs to be removed in its resulting fractions.

This process developed by AAE is the globally unique "One-Step-Activation Process", which offers significant advantages over all other technologies used in the world to date.

Activated carbon production in other activation plants around the world has so far relied on the use of pyrolized material, i.e. coke. These must either be produced in an additional process step before activation, which requires a separate pyrolysis plant, or require the purchase of coke, which in turn massively reduces the plant operator's flexibility in purchasing raw materials and, by shortening its own value chain, reduces most of the potential profit. In addition, the purchase of coke, which is generally produced under Stone Age conditions without the slightest environmental protection standards in the simplest charcoal works, is not sustainable from today's perspective and has therefore become socially unacceptable.