How to make high quality charcoal briquettes: Accelerants

In order to make charcoal briquettes with high quality features, this is a compositive project, accelerant plays an important role in making qualified charcoal briquettes. It is for this reason that there are many customers asking me- what kinds of accelerant will be used, and how to opt to a proper accelerant when you manufacture charcoal briquettes in good quality. Based on our testing experience for many years and feedback from customers, now let me share some information about accelerants as following, hope it is helpful for your charcoal briquette production line.

Previously, people had been tried chemical nitrates as accelerant, especially sodium nitrate. But you have to avoid using potassium nitrate and ammonium nitrate, because they are dangerous due to their features of inflammable. As a result, please don’t use the nitrates as binder during charcoal briquetting process. On the other hand, the price of nitrates is very high in many countries. During charcoal briquetting, you should blend 3-5% accelerant with charcoal powder in the mixing step, your production cost of charcoal briquettes will be higher. Comparing with lump charcoal, the charcoal briquettes won’t be priced well in the market. Additionally, there is an important information that nitrates are fuel energy, which means that they could provide heat by themselves. If you focus on high end markets like USA, just go ahead and continue use sodium nitrate as an accelerant during briquetting process, because the high end market prefers to pay more for charcoal’s high quality. But if your main market is in developing countries, you should forgo using of nitrates because of its higher price. Instead, you can consider about using sawdust as accelerant. And you should remember that use about 10-15% of sawdust as accelerant, which will emit a lot of smoke during charcoal burning, because the sawdust is un-carbonized. There is one way to reduce the smoke during sawdust burning, you can try to put some sawdust into water for 5 days to ferment. Or you have to carbonize the final briquette after produced.

Zhengzhou E.P Machinery is specialized in all kinds of briquetting press machines. We are highly appreciated that if you could discuss briquette machines or technical problems during briquetting process.